Australian Actors Samara Weaving and Inde Navarrette Join Marvel’s New X-Men Movie
A South Australian who learned her trade in Summer Bay, and a Californian raised by an Australian mother, have landed among the mutants Marvel Studios will build its next decade around.
When Kevin Feige walked onstage at Disney’s D23 fan event in Anaheim on August 15 to reveal the cast of the studio’s long-awaited X-Men reboot, two of the names announced were Australian talent.
Samara Weaving will play Emma Frost, the telepathic mutant who has moved between villain and hero across decades of the comics. Inde Navarrette will play Rogue, the power-absorbing mutant and one of the most popular characters in the X-Men canon.
The pair join Kit Connor as Scott Summers, Christopher Abbott as Professor Charles Xavier, Maya Boyd as Storm and Sadie Sink as Jean Grey. Adam Driver was announced by video as the villain Nathaniel Milbury.
The new X-Men film will be directed by Jake Schreier (Thunderbolts) and scheduled to open in cinemas on May 5, 2028.
Weaving grew up in Adelaide and is the niece of Hugo Weaving. She built her early reputation on Australian screens, playing Indi Walker on Home and Away between 2009 and 2013, work that earned her an AACTA Award nomination.
International roles followed. She broke through in the 2019 horror-comedy Ready or Not, then appeared in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon and the Babysitter films, and returned to her breakout role this year in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Emma Frost is her biggest part to date.
Navarrette’s link to Australia is through family rather than birthplace. She was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 2001 to an Australian mother and a Mexican father, and was raised mostly by her mother, moving often as a child. She has said she attended eleven schools before she was fifteen.
She worked her way up through smaller roles, including a run on Netflix series 13 Reasons Why and a recurring part as Sarah Cushing on Superman & Lois, before the breakout low-budget thriller Obsession made her a name and drew the attention of Schreier and Marvel.
Rogue is likely to be a central figure in the new films as Marvel shifts its shared universe toward the X-Men for the first time.
That is an important shift given that the first 15 years of the MCU were built around lesser-known characters while Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and the X-Men were still locked to Sony and Fox ownership.
With those characters now at Disney, Marvel will likely want to place the mutants at the centre of their next saga, given their popularity among comic book fans, and Marvel president Kevin Feige’s own affinity for them. After all, Feige first ever producer role was as a producer on the 2000 X-Men movie.
The casting news of picking Australian actors to lead tentpole Marvel movies is not entirely news, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor both anchoring major franchises for decades now.
Marvel Studios have not released any plot details about their X-Men film, and production timing has not been confirmed. The film opens on May 5, 2028.
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