Jessica Chastain's 'Dark Phoenix' secret character explained

Jessica Chastain is good at keeping secrets. Back in 2017, EW talked to Chastain about her mysterious villain role in Dark Phoenix and she wouldn’t spill the beans. “I don’t know what I can describe about this character without giving everything away,” said the actress.

[SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN DARK PHOENIX!]

Well now that Phoenix is in theaters, we finally have our answer: Chastain actually plays TWO characters. She’s a suburban wife who is killed and then mimicked by a shapeshifting D’Bari alien named Vuk, whose planet was wiped out by the Phoenix Force. Vuk wants to take that power from Jean (Sophie Turner) and use it to start life again for the D’Bari population.

Comic book fans will recognize that Vuk is a character from the series but writer/director Simon Kinberg’s version is more of a combination. Says Kinberg, “There were a lot of things from the original Dark Phoenix saga that I left out in order to serve as the more emotional and go really deep with Jean, things like the Hellfire Club and Lilandra and her relationship with Charles that I felt like deserved their own entire movie. I started looking at different characters in the D’Bari mythos and Vuk was a character who became part of not just the Dark Phoenix story but sort of the X-Men universe. The character is still the sort of compendium of a lot of different characters that people would know from comics.”

Kinberg cites Lilandra, Emma Frost and Mastermind as inspirations for the Chastain’s character and production even hired a linguist to create the D’Bari language.

Related content:

• Prep for Dark Phoenix with EW’s X-Men collector’s edition
• Final Dark Phoenix trailer charts Jean Grey’s evil evolution
• Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg on the new trailer and the death of SPOILER