It would appear that director Simon Kinberg and the folks over at 20th Century Fox have zeroed in on an actress to portray a young(er) Jean Grey in 2018’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix. According to IMDb (via Screen Rant), Summer Fontana will take on the role that actresses Famke Janssen, Haley Ramm and Sophie Turner all filled before her. While the movie database hasn’t always been a reliable source for movie news, a post from Fontana’s Twitter places her in Montreal, which is where the film is currently shooting, making her involvement with the project highly likely.
The upcoming adaptation of Chris Claremont’s Dark Phoenix Saga, one of the most revered storylines in all of comics, will see Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner reprising her role as the titular telepathic young adult mutant from last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. Fontana’s casting implies that Dark Phoenix won’t take place entirely in the 1990s and will feature at least one flashback to Grey’s upbringing/origin. Director Brett Ratner previously showed us a glimpse of Jean Grey’s childhood in X-Men: The Last Stand, but, of course, X-Men Days of Future Past erased much (if not all) of that film’s continuity, giving this latest series entry a blank canvas.
Fontana has only a handful of acting credits to her name, but most notably, she had a recurring role in the latest season of CW’s Vampire Diaries spin-off The Originals.
Following X-Men: First Class, X-Men Days of Future Past and X-Men Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix will look to jumpstart a new trilogy of X-Men films, continuing to primarily center around young versions of beloved characters from the franchise.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix is set for release on November 2nd, 2018. Simon Kinberg is directing a cast that includes franchise veterans Michael Fassbender (Magneto), James McAvoy (Professor X), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler) and Evan Peters (Quicksilver) alongside Jessica Chastain as Lilandra and Lamar Johnson in an as-yet-unrevealed role.
