'X-Men: Apocalypse' director Bryan Singer gets candid on 'complete, absolute bulls--t' sex abuse charges

X-Men: Apocalypse is a comic book epic with massive set pieces and mutant-on-mutant battles. But its director, Bryan Singer, had his own battle to contend with last year, when the director was accused of sexually abusing an actor named Michael Egan years earlier when Egan was a teen. Singer denied the accusation and Egan’s case eventually fell apart, but the scandal hit just as X-Men: Days of Future Past was opening and planning for Apocalypse was in full swing.

Singer, now 49, says that he never thought about stepping away, nor was he asked to. “I love working,” he says. “This is what I love to do. Making films is something I’ve been doing since I was 13 years old. So to not do it just because of some bulls—, like complete, absolute bulls—, would be absurd.”

The studio seemed to think so too. “The idea of anybody else directing Apocalypse didn’t enter our minds,” says producer Hutch Parker. “For all of us that knew Bryan, we were pretty confident that was all going to go away and be exposed for what that has been exposed as being.” Adds writer/producer Simon Kinberg, “We felt so good with what he did with Days of Future Past and we were so proud of that movie and that process was a very positive process. We never talked about another filmmaker for this.”

•This Week’s Cover: First look at the new generation of mutants in X-Men: Apocalypse

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To continue reading the cover story on X-Men: Apocalypse, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, on newsstands Friday.