Patrick Stewart's Professor X was never going to get the send-off he deserved. Stewart's death was announced on Oct. 29, and the outpouring of grief was immediate among fans of his work across Marvel, Star Trek, Shakespeare, and his iconic Extras episode. When a famous actor dies, especially one who's still actively working like Stewart was, it's only natural to wonder what projects they had already filmed that will now release posthumously.
In Stewart's case, there appears to only be one — Avengers: Doomsday. The upcoming Marvel movie event, which will combine actors and characters from the MCU and the Fox franchises in a multiversal battle against the storied supervillain Doctor Doom, is set to release this December. The marketing for Doomsday so far has leaned heavily into Stewart and the other returning X-Men characters, including Ian McKellen's Magneto.
It's unclear how much of a role they'll actually play in the movie, though I have a hunch Doom may kill off most of the X-Men early on to prove a point. This won't be the first time Stewart's Professor X has met his maker onscreen for the benefit of X-Men fans, but it's sure to be the most emotional. After two perfect X-Men movies (fight me in the comments, I'm feeling emotional) released in the early 2000s, Charles Xavier met a bizarre end — vaporized by Jean Grey/Phoenix, only to rematerialize in the body of his twin brother — in the bizarre movie X-Men: The Last Stand.
Stewart returned to the role for X-Men: Days of Future Past (another perfect X-Men movie) and then delivered arguably his best Marvel performance in Logan, as an aging version of the powerful mutant psychic struggling with mental illness that turns his superpowers into a ticking time bomb. It was a powerful subversion of the beloved character, and it probably should have been his sendoff. But with the sale of Fox to Disney at the end of the 2010s, Charles and Logan were both dragged into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only for Professor X to die yet again at the hands of the Scarlet Witch in a particularly brutal sequence from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
He'll return once more in Avengers: Doomsday, where we can only assume the character will meet his maker yet again to make room for a new generation of X-Men actors. But this time, the onscreen death of Charles Xavier will be that much more emotional. Across all these movies, the secret to Stewart's performance as Professor X is that he never tried to hog the spotlight.
As the wise leader of a team of young superheroes, Stewart played the role with endless empathy and charm. Venture deep enough into the comics and a dark edge to Charles Xavier quickly reveals itself, but that was rarely the version we saw onscreen thanks to the calming warmth of the actor's performance. Even in a bad X-Men movie, Stewart elevated every scene he was in.
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