James McAvoy played the young Charles Xavier across four X-Men films, but the one most fans rank as the best of the run is the one he was afraid to make. Looking back at X-Men: Days of Future Past more than a decade later, McAvoy admits he thought merging his First Class cast with the original trilogy was a mistake — and that he was completely wrong about it.
McAvoy made the admission on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, reflecting on how the 2014 film helped pioneer the franchise mashups that later defined an era of blockbuster filmmaking, from Avengers: Infinity War to Spider-Man: No Way Home. He said the film felt like it arrived "right at the beginning of all these mashups of time, and mashups of casts," yet pulled the trick off brilliantly.
His fear came from what First Class had just accomplished. The 2011 reboot had taken the series in a different, tangential direction and succeeded critically and financially, and the cast loved making it. Days of Future Past instead swung the franchise back toward the approach of Bryan Singer's 1999 and 2000 films — and McAvoy, by his own account, was scared going into the movie, feeling the pivot was a misstep. "But I was wrong," he concluded, "because I think the film's incredible."
The film put McAvoy in an unusual position: sharing the role of Professor X with Patrick Stewart, whose portrayal in the original trilogy had made the character iconic. The story sent Wolverine back in time to avert a dark future, weaving the two casts into a single narrative adapted from the classic comics arc — and it demanded more of McAvoy as an actor than any other film in the series, with Charles' arc at its emotional center. McAvoy has said elsewhere that the role gave him more of an acting workout than he had experienced in any other movie, comic book or otherwise, because the story focused so deeply on Charles' journey.
Audiences agreed with the gamble. Days of Future Past grossed around $747 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing X-Men film of its era and earning praise for balancing two ensembles that could easily have collapsed under their own weight.
Time has only been kind to the movie. Days of Future Past is now routinely ranked among the greatest comic book films ever made, and the entries that followed it in McAvoy's own timeline — X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016 and Dark Phoenix in 2019 — were received far more coolly, which has made the 2014 film look stronger still by comparison.
X-Men: Days of Future Past is streaming on Disney+.
Source: Happy Sad Confused
