The class of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse keeps growing. Today the sequel added yet another mutant to its ranks–actress Olivia Munn has joined the cast as Betsy Braddock, a.k.a. Psylocke. The news was announced similarly to how most news has come out for this film lately, via director Bryan Singer’s Instagram account:
Psylocke has had a long and complicated history with the X-Men. She was originally introduced as a British (and, at the time, Caucasian) telepathic mutant who joined the team in the late ’80s, back when the X-Men were pretending to be dead to the world at large and living in the Australian outback (it’s a long story)/ Then in the early ’90s, she was given a badass makeover as her mind fused with that of a Japanese ninja named Kwannon. This version proved far more popular than the shy, pixie-ish original iteration of the character, and is the version that is still in use in the comics.
Technically Psylocke has already appeared in the X-Men film series. There was a cameo appearance from an Asian woman with purple hair credited as being Psylocke in X-Men: The Last Stand, although she’s never called that by name in the movie…. but I think we can just all agree to ignore that version. Right now, the number of mutants in Apocalypse is gearing up to match those in X-Men: Days of Future Past. It’ll be interesting to see if many of these new characters will have parts similar in size to the future X-Men from that film, like Warpath and Sunspot, who basically had a cool action scene but  not much else. Although…. if they were to add Rogue, Colossus, and Ice-Man at this point, they could find a way to recreate that iconic  Jim Lee cover of X-Men #1 from 1991 in the movie, and that would be pretty dope.
