The X-Men comics villain is not a baddie “in the sense that you expect them to be,” according to actor Emma Corrin.

Cassandra Nova has a golden ticket into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Emmy nominee and Golden Globe winner Emma Corrin (The Crown) portrays the X-Men villain in Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine, which mashes up the MCU and the former Fox X-Verse when Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) and Logan (Hugh Jackman) crossover into the Disney-owned franchise. But that’s not the only mixing of worlds happening when the R-rated multiverse movie opens in theaters on July 26th.

Corrin’s bald, Scrumdiddlyumptious supervillain is described as a mashup of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka — the warm and whimsical, yet unpredictable and sometimes manic chocolatier in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory — and Col. Hans Landa, Christoph Waltz’s sadistic Nazi villain from Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglorious Basterds.

“Ryan and [director Shawn Levy] pitched this idea, which I was totally on board with: ‘We want this villain to not be a villain in the sense that you expect them to be. We want you to be so endeared by her, so charmed by her, and just when you think that maybe she’s totally seen into your soul and you are going to be best friends for life, you’re dead,'” Corrin, who uses they/them pronouns, told EW.
(Photo:  Left to right: Wilder’s Willy Wonka, Corrin’s Cassandra Nova, and Waltz’s Hans Landa. )
Reynolds and Levy, who also co-wrote the script, wanted their Cassandra Nova to be “unpredictable,” influenced by Waltz’s Oscar-winning role as the charismatic but cold-blooded Standartenführer. “He’s so disarmingly polite and nice and unaffected, and it’s really creepy,” Corrin explained. “It’s all the more sinister because he doesn’t need to do anything.”

In the comics, Cassandra Nova was thought to be the “twin sister” of the telepath Professor Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men. It was eventually revealed that Cassandra is actually a “Mummudrai,” a formless being of living emotional energy. Xavier’s pseudo-twin was born without a body but with similar telekenetic and telepathic powers, which she used to wage war on the “mutant menace.” Deadpool & Wolverine marks the first time that the character, created in 2001’s Grant Morrison-penned New X-Men #114, has appeared outside of a comic book.

Here, she operates out of a base fashioned from a giant-sized Ant-Man corpse — a nod to Marvel’s Old Man Logan comic — and leads a faction of variants from branched timelines pruned by the Time Variance Authority, including Sabretooth (Tyler Mane) and Toad from 2000’s X-Men.

Starring alongside Reynolds, Jackman, and Corrin are returning Deadpool cast members Morena Baccarin, Leslie Uggams, Karan Soni, Rob Delaney, Brianna Hildebrand, Shioli Kutsuna, and Stefan Kapičić, with Succession star Matthew Macfadyen joining the MCU as TVA Agent Paradox. Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine is only in theaters July 26th.