After months of little news on Hugh Jackman's final Wolverine film, Logan, suddenly the curtain is being pulled back more each day. And there are two big character questions that were left unanswered before today: Who would be playing the villain Mister Sinister, and is the Wolverine clone X-23 making her debut? Well now we may have answers to both thanks to The Wrap.
A closer look at the above poster, revealed a few days ago, shows that the hand clutching Wolverine's belongs to a small child. That child is indeed meant to be X-23, or "Laura", and she will be played by Sienna Novikov, who is indeed the young actress we saw on set before. X-23, whose real name is Laura Kinney in the comics, is a clone designed out of Wolverine's DNA. So she isn't literally his daughter, but their relationship is often that of a father and daughter. Like him she has superhuman senses, speed, a healing factor, and adamantium claws.
So how does she factor into this story? In the year 2024 the number of mutant births has drastically declined, so a government-run operation known as Transigen has begun transforming young mutant children into killing machines, very much like what happened to Wolverine at Weapon X. Something tells me it will be tied to Transigen somehow because you simply have to include them in Wolverine's final movie.
Thanks to an Instagram image posted yesterday we know for sure that Boyd Holbrook will take on the role of cyborg leader, Donald Pierce. So where does that leave Mister Sinister? Nowhere, apparently. Speculation had been Richard E. Grant was playing the evil mutant geneticist, but The Wrap says Sinister isn't in the movie at all. Grant's role will be that of Dr. Xander Rice, who in the comics was the surgical head for the program that created X-23. His father had been a top scientist at the Weapon X facility while Wolverine was there, and was killed by him during his bloody escape. We witnessed that savage attack during X-Men: Apocalypse and the immediate aftermath in the post-credits scene that introduced Sinister's Essex Corporation.
Don't be surprised if there's more news later today on Logan, which opens March 3rd 2017.
