Eine neue Nightcrawler? Wunderbar!
Late last night, X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer revealed on his official Instagram account that his upcoming 2016 movie will feature the return of the Marvel Comics character Nightcrawler, now played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Here's the Instagram post from Singer...
The 18-year-old Australian actor is probably best known as the voice of Norman Babcock in the 2012 animated film ParaNorman, and has appeared in a number of films including The Road, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Congress and Let Me In.
Created in 1975 by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum, Nightcrawler first appeared in Giant-Size X-Men #1 as Kurt Wagner, a mutant with somewhat demonic physical characteristics who has the ability to teleport along with superhuman agility. As the son of Mystique and the demon Azazel, Kurt was raised by sorceress and Gypsy queen Margali Szardos in a small Bavarian circus until he was rescued from an angry mob in Winzeldorf, Germany by Professor Charles Xavier. Adopting the code name Nightcrawler, Kurt became a member of Xavier's second class of X-Men.
In recent years, Nightcrawler was killed during a battle with Bastion, but was later resurrected when his father Azazel launched an attack on Heaven using his connection to Kurt as a gateway. Kurt used small versions of himself called Bamfs along with that same connection to return to Earth, which prevented his father from attacking Heaven once again.
Smit-McPhee will be the second actor to portray Nightcrawler in live action, after Alan Cumming in Singer's previous 2003 film X2: X-Men United. The character has appeared in a number of animated projects, including Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (voiced by Stanley Jones), Pryde of the X-Men (voiced by Neil Ross), the 1992 X-Men animated series (voiced by Paul Haddad), X-Men: Evolution (voiced by Brad Swaile), and Wolverine and the X-Men (voiced by Liam O'Brien).
X-Men: Apocalypse in scheduled to arrive in theaters on May 27, 2016.