"I'm considering Gambit and potentially a young Nightcrawler for 'Apocalypse. I was going to have Nightcrawler [in 'Days of Future Past'] and even wrote a scene, but I felt that we were forcing too many mutants into the story."
That was what Bryan Singer said a year ago in regards to the fresh injection of mutant blood he planned to inject into X-men: Apocalypse, the follow-up to X-men: Days of Future Past. So far we've seen Tye Sheridan come aboard as a young Cyclops, Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, and Alexandra Shipp as Storm. And as for Gambit? That role was eventually filled by Channing Tatum. What we hadn't heard is anything about Nightcrawler, but now we know it will be Kodi Smit-McPhee taking on the role of the teleporting mutant.
Nightcrawler was last seen as an adult in X-2: X-men United played by Alan Cumming. Smit-McPhee is probably best known for his roles in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Road, Let Me In, and as the lead voice in ParaNorman. This will be a reunion of sorts as Smit-McPhee recently starred with Michael Fassbender in the Western dramedy, Slow West (review here), which premiered at Sundance. The Aussie actor will need to bang out a believable German accent to play Nightcrawler aka Kurt Wagner, who is a blue-skinned elven mutant known who has been a mainstay of the team since introduced in Giant Size X-men #1 in 1975.
X-men: Apocalypse brings back James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult, with Oscar Isaac playing the title villain. The film opens May 27th 2016 and begins shooting in April.
