According to Deadline, Samara Weaving has been chosen to play Emma Frost in the upcoming X-Men movie, the first of a potential flurry of announcements about the franchise.
The reports state that Marvel has spent much of the summer buried in casting for its new X-Men film, with director Jake Schreier and studio executives working through auditions for several key roles. Emma Frost is said to have been the toughest to crack, with a shortlist of actors only finalised for testing shortly after July 4th. Since then, word has spread that one performance in particular, Weaving’s, was the standout.
Emma Frost has been part of the X-Men comics since the 1980s, introduced as a formidable telepathic villain before a personal tragedy pushed her toward redemption and, eventually, a place among the X-Men themselves. On screen, the role has most recently belonged to January Jones, across X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past.
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Fans have been hoping for a new X-Men film ever since Disney folded 20th Century Fox’s library into its own back in 2019, and this project only really started moving once Schreier came aboard fresh off the success of Thunderbolts* with Beef’s Lee Sung Jin and The Bear’s Joanna Calo were subsequently brought in to write it. Hype for the film has built even further after the events of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
For Weaving, this caps off an already big year. She led Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, reprising her role as Grace MacCaullay in the sequel to 2019’s horror-comedy hit, a sleeper release that made back three times its budget within a single day online and climbed high in Disney+’s global rankings. She’s also had Over Your Dead Body, which took the Audience Award at SXSW, and the romantic crime thriller Carolina Caroline, a New York Times Critics’ Pick.
The rest of the cast is still under wraps, though Marvel is expected to have more to share at D23 this August.
