The director of Dark Phoenix explains the death of his major character

[[[[Spoilers, of course.]

If you were surprised to see the new trailer of Dark Phoenix seemed to give the death of a major character, get ready to be carried away. Writer-director Simon Kinberg He sat down to chat with the people of EW and he not only confirmed the huge spoiler, he plunged deeply into the process of thinking behind the shocking death.

In what is easily one of the strangest and least secret preliminary interviews I've ever seen, Kinberg explains in detail why he decided to kill Mystic. the main franchise character was created by Rebecca Romijn and currently played by Jennifer Lawrence. This is a turnaround from traditional pre-publication interviews, which generally revolve around the spoiler-phobia mystery box method. On the contrary, Kinberg digs right in.

"Well, the thinking process behind that was mainly to show that it was a movie that did not look like other X-Men movies. It's a film where shocking things happen, things that are intense and dramatic. People do not fall from buildings, dust themselves and move away. This film has a reality and a consequence for this film. Better still, it was to show that Jean / Dark Phoenix posed a real threat to everyone, including the X-Men. "

The filmmaker then explained how he had decided to bid farewell to one of the biggest stars of the franchise and why he had decided that Mystic would make death an ideal character to advance the plot.

"I had a lot of emotions about it. I was obviously sad about it, as a friend of Jen, and also as a fan of Jen as an actress. But I felt it was the strongest and most dramatic thing for the film, and sometimes you have to make those tough decisions to serve the big story. And the big story is really that of Jean who cracks, losing control because she is more powerful than anyone else in the world. To dramatize this, it is necessary to show a real loss, a real pain, a real threat. I did not want to do that by blowing up a building with anonymous people. It had to be really personal for the X-Men, and I wanted it to be something that broke the X-Men. Mysticism is a person who in our universe is part of the X-Men and the world of Magneto. His death literally touches everyone.

Death itself, as seen in the trailer, also seems familiar to X-Men fans. Staged in the street outside the house of his childhood, the scene sees John lose control of himself and kills one of his own … it's exactly how Professor X (Patrick Stewart) dead in X-Men: The Final Clash (that Kinberg also wrote). According to Kinberg, he was aware of the similarities but they were not meant to go back.

"I was conscious of it. There are scenes of her returning home in comics. It's an important element, and then the other important thing is what you said: going home is such a raw emotion for a character. When I was writing, I was not aware of that, to be honest with you. When I started editing it and you became purely creative or a bit more objective after you finished a rough draft, I thought, "Oh yes, it's something of X3. "But it's certainly not a homage, and it's a very, very different sequence."