The disparate group must put their
diff erences aside, though, to battle the villain
of the piece — the CGI-rendered ‘Demon Bear’,
a Freddy Krueger-esque presence that has long
haunted Dani’s nightmares.
For 21-year-old (at time of fi lming) Blu Hunt,
in her fi rst ever screen role, playing Dani has
been “an honour” — largely because, as an actor
of Native American origin, she’s in uncharted
territory as a comic-book fi lm protagonist. “I’m
an indigenous superhero,” she grins. “I’m not
just in the background, to please people. I’m
carrying the movie.”
It’s not the only way The New Mutants is
breaking boundaries. Firstly, in a middle fi nger to
traditionally male-driven superhero tropes, the
female characters take centre stage here. “The boys
are the eye candy!” Taylor-Joy jokes. “But seriously,
it’s amazing to be in a fi lm that puts women fi rst.
We were meant to do this shot of me walking
away from behind, but Josh was like: ‘No, that’s
not your role here: let’s make it Henry instead!’”
More signifi cantly on the envelope-pushing
front, we have Dani’s burgeoning romance with
the fi fth member of the mutant gang: shape-
shifting Rahne, aka Wolfsbane, played by Game
Of Thrones’ Maisie Williams.
“In the comics, Dani and Rahne are
telepathic,” Williams says. “Which is basically
what love is, anyway, right? Being able to read
another person’s thoughts? So, it felt like a
natural extension of that. Plus, Blu and I are both
5 ' 1 ", and that is just too goddamn cute.”
In the furore surrounding the fi lm’s delay,
this romantic subplot has been overlooked
slightly, but there’s no denying what a big deal it is.
We’re not talking about Joe Russo’s ten-second
Endgame cameo or Valkyrie’s hinted-at bisexuality
in Thor: Ragnarok; this is a major superhero fi lm
with a lesbian love story running right through it.
Hunt cackles merrily at the waves she knows it
will make: “I love it when I see people online, like,
‘Nah, no way there’s a gay love story in this.’ I’m
thinking, ‘Wait ’til you see us making out!’”
Boone is adamant that the plotline is “historic,
in that it’s never been done before in a movie like
this. But we don’t make a big deal of them being
gay: the movie’s not about that. This is an eff ort
to normalise it.” Hunt agrees: “There’s a moment
when Rahne says, ‘I’ve never done this before.’
I say, ‘With a girl?’ and she says, ‘With anyone.’
It’s a coming-of-age love story like any other.”
For Williams, the fi lm is more romantic
drama than comic-book blockbuster: “It’s not
a ‘coming out’ tale — they never even discuss
coming out — but their journey together is
integral to the whole story arc.” While she’s
confi dent that audiences will relate, she remains
adamant that, “watching me hit on anyone is
so cringe. But I feel honoured to make this moviein support of LGBT people. It’s weird that [a gay
relationship] in this kind of fi lm is such a big
deal. It’s actually strange it’s taken so long.”“I KNOW, I KNOW: YOU HAVE TO
ask,” Boone laughs, as Empire brings up the fi lm’s
lengthy delay when we reconvene in January 2020.
What was the story, though? Unhappy execs?
Frantic reshoots? Parental script-burnings? “If
there were any of those, I didn’t hear about them,”
Boone chuckles. “The real reason is simple: when
the merger happened, our movie was frozen.”
He’s referring to the $71.3 billion acquisition
of 21st Century Fox (home of the X-Men) by the
Walt Disney Company (home of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe): a deal that was offi cially
announced in March 2019, but began taking shape
in late 2017, just weeks after The New Mutants
wrapped. “Disney were fully behind our vision,”
Boone says. “They just didn’t know what to do with
it. They wanted to make their own X-Men movies:
that’s why they absorbed Fox. So, we were in this
strange position where we had to wait, not knowing
what was happening. Then once the merger was
fi nalised, [the studio] put all their eff orts into Dark
Phoenix. That’s a $200 million movie with big stars,
so it took priority over ours, which had a similar
budget to the fi rst Deadpool [$58 million].”
So it was all due to politics and scheduling? TheTaylor-Joy
as Russian mutant
sorceress Illyana
Rasputin, aka
Magik. Her brother
is Colossus, of
X-Men fame.