Patrick Stewart Reflects on His Final X-Men Movie Role

Patrick Stewart’s Professor X was never going to get the send-off he deserved.

Patrick Stewart’s death was announced on Oct. 29, and fans of his work across Marvel, Star Trek, Shakespeare, and his iconic Extras episode immediately expressed their grief. When a famous actor dies while still actively working, people naturally wonder what already filmed projects will release posthumously. In Patrick Stewart’s case, only one such project appears to exist: Avengers: Doomsday.

The upcoming Marvel movie event combines actors and characters from the MCU and the Fox franchises in a multiversal battle against Doctor Doom, and it releases this December. Marketing for Doomsday has leaned heavily into Patrick Stewart and returning X-Men characters like Ian McKellen’s Magneto. The extent of their actual roles remains unclear, though Doctor Doom might eliminate most of the X-Men early on to establish dominance.

Professor X has met his maker onscreen before for the benefit of X-Men fans, but this instance is sure to carry the most emotion.

Charles Xavier met a bizarre end in X-Men: The Last Stand after two early-2000s X-Men movies, vaporized by Jean Grey or Phoenix before rematerializing in the body of his twin brother.

Patrick Stewart returned for X-Men: Days of Future Past and delivered arguably his best Marvel performance in Logan. In that film, he played an aging version of the powerful mutant psychic struggling with mental illness that turned his superpowers into a ticking time bomb. That powerful subversion of the character likely should have served as his send-off.

The sale of Fox to Disney in the late 2010s pulled Charles Xavier and Logan into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Professor X then died again at the hands of the Scarlet Witch in a brutal sequence from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. He returns once more in Avengers: Doomsday, where the character will likely meet his end once more to make room for a new generation of X-Men actors. This time, the onscreen death of Charles Xavier will carry much more weight.

Across all these movies, the secret to Patrick Stewart’s performance as Professor X is that he never tried to hog the spotlight. As the wise leader of a team of young superheroes, Patrick Stewart played the role with endless empathy and charm. Comics reveal a dark edge to Charles Xavier, but the calming warmth of the actor’s performance kept that version off screen.

Patrick Stewart elevated every scene he inhabited, even in weaker X-Men movies. Memorable moments from those films typically feature Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine doing something badass, but without Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, those films and modern superhero cinema would struggle to exist. Patrick Stewart’s tremendous acting talent anchored the entire genre, legitimizing a quarter century of movies and television shows.

As the superhero movie era reaches a natural low point and Marvel pursues a final box office gasp, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X receives one final send-off. The moment might not match the perfection of Logan, but no conclusion would have felt entirely correct.

Patrick Stewart’s Professor X was never going to get the send-off he deserved because audiences never wanted to see him go. It is simply unfortunate that it had to end like this.

Source: Polygon