No one knows more about Psylocke than Olivia Munn — at least, no one on the set of X-Men: Apocalypse. Even Bryan Singer joked in interviews about how little he knew about the character compared to Munn. "I felt like I had to basically pitch her," she said on the film’s set. "You have to do her justice."
Since landing the role of Apocalypse’s psionic blade-wielding Horseman, she’s been schooling the production team on the character. When they initially made her costume black, she said, "It has the be purple." When she realized how sexual Psylocke looked, she made sure the producers knew about her comic book roots. Though her character’s film future isn’t clear beyond her role in Apocalypse, Munn, with all this knowledge at her fingertips, has a few ideas on which story to tell in a potential standalone movie.
What the actress and self-proclaimed geek girl always loved about the character is how she came from a good family and lost everything.
If Psylocke had the chance to tell her story, it would be great to start with the genesis,' she said, citing the years after the character graduated from university. Maybe, as she said, 'We jump in the days right before all of her family is taken out and we have an understanding of what she had to lose, then her figuring out her powers and how powerful she is.'
Apocalypse's Four Horsemen have very specific abilities. While Storm can manipulate weather, Magneto metal, and Archangel gets a winged upgrade, Psylocke can create psionic weapons, including a katana and dagger. We've seen video of Munn training for these weapons, but she said it was James McAvoy's idea to learn how to wield them with both hands.
The thing about sword work is that you're always keeping somebody off, like they don't really know what's happening...and so, he was like, 'Well, you can really throw them off if you were going from your real sword to your psychic sword, and just switching hands.'
With Deadpool and Gambit getting their own solo films as Wolverine gets his third, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for Psylocke to follow suit, especially if the characters proves to be a fan favorite in Apocalypse. The only issue with Olivia Munn’s idea is that the character’s origin would have to be tweaked from the comics.
When we meet Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse, she is fully formed as Psylocke. Munn described how she "was really big about staying so true to Psylocke," including the fact that she became Psylocke "because of the alien that took her body" and how "she was Psylocke after the Apocalypse story line." But because of the timeline — and, she joked, because she wanted to be in the movie — there are some divergences from the source material.
Find out what else was changed when X-Men: Apocalypse opens in theaters on May 27.
