[This story contains spoilers for Dark Phoenix.]
It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Jennifer Lawrence’s character Mystique dies in the forthcoming X-Men installment, Dark Phoenix. A trailer previewed the plot development in February, while director Simon Kinberg explained the death in an interview not long after.
On an appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! with fellow Dark Phoenix castmembers, Lawrence revealed how she reacted to her own character’s death scene, which she said made her cry — but not due to Mystique’s demise. “I teared up a little bit watching Sophie in that scene,” Lawrence told host Jimmy Kimmel, speaking of her co-star Sophie Turner, who plays the titular character. “Her reaction to the death was so emotional.” Lawrence revealed that Turner was crying in the scene “because her dialect coach before the scene took her Juul away.”
“It’s how I act,” Turner joked, speaking of her vape pen. “Take it away, give it back, that’s happy and sad.”
In an Entertainment Weekly interview in February, Kinberg explained the logic behind the death scene. “The thought process behind that was to primarily show that this is a movie that is unlike other X-Men movies. It’s a movie where shocking things happen, where intense, dramatic things happen,” he said. “People don’t just fall off buildings and dust themselves off and walk away. There’s a reality to this movie and a consequence to this movie. Even more than that, it was to show that Jean/Dark Phoenix is genuinely a threat to everyone, including the X-Men.”
At other moments in the group appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday, stars Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy discussed their habit of riding golf carts around the X-Men set. At one point, Fassbender said, “I thought, wow, James is actually really good, really fast, but then I realized that James was just crazy, he’s going way too fast.” The pair then described an accident they got into while trying to “counterbalance” the vehicle, and Fassbender showed off the scar he still bore from the joyride.
When Kimmel brought up the fact that stars Jessica Chastain and Tye Sheridan had worked together before, in 2011’s The Tree of Life, when Sheridan was very young, he joked that Chastain probably bought Sheridan his first beer. Chastain, protesting the joke, said that in fact when Sheridan told her on Tree of Life that he wanted to be an actor, she encouraged him and “we would work on his auditions together.”
“Like Sophie and her Juul pen, it’s a very close relationship,” Kimmel joked in response.
At the end of their appearance, the cast went through a jar where they had all placed pieces of paper identifying their greatest fears and attempted to guess which fear was whose. Chastain revealed her greatest fear to be snakes, Sheridan to be stranded in the Pacific Ocean and Nicholas Hoult to be “not getting enough food at cast dinners.”
