Wicked star Cynthia Erivo pitches her next dream role: X-Men's Storm
We guess, when it comes to manifesting big things for yourself, there are worse times to do it than when you're coming off of one $680 million box office hit, with another one expected later this year; credit to Wicked star Cynthia Erivo for not beating around the bush, then, when asked what dream part she'd love to tackle next: X-Men hero Ororo "Storm" Munroe.
Erivo was asked the potentially daunting "dream role" question this week at the National Board Of Review Awards, where Wicked ended up taking home Best Film honors. "I really want to play Storm," Erivo asserted. "I know it sounds frivolous, but I think we haven't uncovered how grand she is, and all of that inner turmoil that she has. So I think there's a world in which we could do something like that."
The beloved weather witch, created for the comics in 1975, has had two notable portrayals in theaters: Halle Berry, of course, played her sporadically for 14 years, appearing prominently in the first three X-Men movies and then reprising the role for 2014's X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Alexandra Shipp, meanwhile played a younger Storm in the franchise's soft reboot, appearing most prominently in 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse. (We'd also be remiss not to mention Alison Sealy-Smith, who voiced the character in the Saturday morning cartoon series before reprising the role for both X-Men '97 and in the most recent season of Marvel's What If…?, making her the only performer to play the character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date.) Marvel has continued to be very, very quiet about its plans for the X-Men characters, despite a few little trickles (including this summer's Deadpool And Wolverine). So it's entirely possibly that Erivo still has time to manifest her desire to play the beloved X-Men character, since god knows when we'll actually see any of these folks show up in theaters again.
Online responses to Erivo's comment were, of course, extremely normal, and not at all depressing or weird.