Deadpool & Wolverine‘s Cassandra Nova Is One of Marvel’s Coolest Villains in Years

WHILE WANDERING THROUGH the desert void, the titular heroes in Deadpool & Wolverine think they’ve finally met a familiar friend. Out from the head of the fallen Ant-Man (in Giant-Man form), which now serves a base, comes a bald-headed figure in a wheelchair.

“Charles!” gasps Wolverine in relief, certain that he and Deadpool have found a Variant of X-Men founder Charles Xavier. But the figure stands, revealing herself to be not Charles, but his twin sister Cassandra Nova. And unlike her brother, Cassandra uses her formidable mental abilities to toy with her victims, not to bring out the best in others.

Played with evil glee by Emma Corrin, Cassandra Nova manages to stand out in a movie filled with more famous faces. Despite their relatively short amount of screen tie, Corrin brings to life the frightening character from the comics, making for one of the best rogues in superhero cinema history.

Who is Casandra Nova’s actor, Emma Corrin?

English actor Emma Corrin (who uses they/them pronouns) broke out on the Netflix series The Crown. Corrin joined the cast of The Crown in its fourth season as Diana of Wales, Princess of Wales, an incredibly high stakes role. Dubbed “The People’s Princess,” Diana still commands love and affection from thousands, even years after her sudden death. Yet, Corrin overcame those expectations to earn a Golden Globe and an Emmy Nomination for their performance.

After The Crown, Corrin went on to appear opposite Harry Styles in My Policeman and with Jack O’Connell in Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the D.H. Lawrence adaptation directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Corrin also earned the lead role in the FX mystery series Murder at the End of the World, which earned strong reviews from audiences and critics.

While Deadpool & Wolverine will certainly earn bigger parts in bigger projects for Corrin, they’ve already got another high-profile movie lined up for 2024. Corrin will play the doomed Anna Harding in director Robert Eggers’s long-awaited remake of Nosferatu, alongside Bill Skarsgård and Nicholas Hoult.

To prepare for Cassandra Nova, Corrin studied the work done by those who played their character’s twin brother Professor X, Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy. Drawing from those actors, Corrin crafts a striking MCU villain, one that builds on the best elements of her comic book predecessor.

Who is Cassandra Nova in Marvel Comics?

For most of Marvel’s history, Charles Xavier had just one notable sibling, his step-brother Cain Marko, better known as the bad guy Juggernaut. But when the idiosyncratic and mind-bending Scottish writer Grant Morrison (who also uses they/them pronouns) took over Marvel’s Mutants with 2001’s New X-Men #114, they added a thorny new branch to the Xavier family tree.

In just her second appearance, Cassandra reprograms a fleet of advanced Sentinels to destroy the island Genosha, killing the thousands of mutants who lived there. Next, Nova swapped bodies with Professor X, killing her brother while right in front of the X-Men, who all just saw Xavier taking drastic action against the woman responsible for the Genosha massacre.

Why weren’t the X-Men prepared for Nova’s attack? Because no one, not even Xavier, knew that she exists.

In one of the most striking images of Morrison’s New X-Men run, penciled by their frequent collaborator and fellow Scot Frank Quitely, we see Cassandra and Charles as fetuses in their mother Sharon’s womb. The embryonic Charles opens his eyes with a start and turns toward his twin. When Charles tries to strangle his sister with her umbilical cord, Cassandra counters with a psychic attack, causing Sharon to go into labor. The doctor pronounced Cassandra stillborn, and Xavier never mentioned her again.

If that sounds bizarre, it gets weirder. A later issue reveals that Cassandra is in fact a “mummudrai,” an alien parasite that was drawn to the vast psychic of Xavier before birth. The mummudrai manifested a physical form copied from Xavier’s fetus, creating a twin where there wasn’t one before.

With the knowledge of Nova’s true origin, the X-Men were able to extract her from Xavier’s body, replace their mentor’s mind, and place her consciousness into a disembodied brain with the hopes that she could be rehabilitated. But Nova would escape and regain her body, returning time and again to torment her chosen twin brother Charles.

Most recently, Cassandra seemed to turn over a new leaf during the Krakoa era of X-Men comics, when all of Marvel’s mutants had their own sovereign nation. Taking advantage of the amnesty that Xavier and Magneto extended to any mutant who came to Krakoa, Cassandra pledged to work for mutant kind instead of against it.

Cassandra joined the crew of the Marauders, who traveled around gathering any mutants who could not otherwise come to Krakoa. But the leaders of the Marauders Kate Pryde and Emma Frost refused to forgive Cassandra for her attack on Genosha. They left her behind during a trip to the distant past, and she has not been heard from since.

What Is Cassandra Nova’s Role in the MCU?

Almost every other character in Deadpool & Wolverine has been seen on screen before, usually in superhero movies that came out years ago. With one big exception (a hilarious cameo we won’t spoil here), Nova is the sole important new character added to superhero cinema, and she makes an immediate impression.

Director Shawn Levy takes full advantage of the R-rating that MCU chief Kevin Feige affords Deadpool & Wolverine to make Cassandra a truly terrifying villain. The movie recreates Cassandra’s attacks from the comics, in which she melds her fingers into the flesh of her victims. Furthermore, she dishes out a grisly death to a beloved character, a shock that even puts Deadpool at a loss for words.

Corrin brings the sadistic Nova of the comics to live action and steals the screen from stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman. With the X-Men on their way to the MCU soon, and with a desire to pit the team against a different antagonist than Magneto, Cassandra Nova would make for a great baddie in the main universe, especially played by Corrin.

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