Before they were the two most powerful telepaths in the Marvel Universe, they were the boyfriends on an HBO dramedy about broke twentysomethings in Brooklyn.
Christopher Abbott, the MCU’s new Professor X, and Adam Driver, its first X-Men villain, both got their starts on Girls.
Somewhere, Lena Dunham is owed a casting director credit on Marvel’s May 2028 reboot.
The Two Boyfriends Of Brooklyn
When Girls premiered in 2012, Driver played Adam Sackler, the unpredictable carpenter and sometime actor attached to Lena Dunham’s Hannah.
Abbott played Charlie Dattolo, the too-nice boyfriend Marnie couldn’t decide if she wanted.
For the show’s first two seasons, they were the two main men orbiting the group. Nobody watching a Bushwick warehouse party scene in 2012 was thinking about mutants.
Two Very Different Roads Out Of Greenpoint
Driver’s rise was vertical. He earned three straight Emmy nominations for Sackler, got cast as Kylo Ren while Girls was still on the air, and stacked two Oscar nominations before the decade closed.
Abbott took the harder road on purpose. He famously walked away from the show after season 2 to chase heavier material, came back for one episode in season 5, “The Panic in Central Park,” that still ranks among the series’ best, and spent the next decade becoming indie film royalty.
One became a movie star immediately. The other became your favorite actor’s favorite actor. Both paths ended at the same franchise.
Now They Play Psychic Chess
The comics history makes the reunion even better.
Charles Xavier and Nathaniel Essex are two of Marvel’s great opposing minds: the teacher who believes in mutants and the scientist who experiments on them.
Their conflicts in the comics are rarely fistfights. They are wars of manipulation, genetics, and secrets that span generations, which is a fancy way of saying Marvel cast two actors who can hold a close-up.
In the Ultimate version of the comics (which, interestingly enough, the MCU was based upon at its start), Ultimate Mr. Sinister was originally a human scientist working for Norman Osborn who experimented on himself to gain powers. The experiments also drove him insane, and he became obsessed with murdering mutants.
After killing several young mutants, the X-Men searched New York for him, not realizing he had already broken into Xavier’s mansion. There, Sinister confronted Professor X and, rather than risk Xavier using his telepathy, simply pushed the wheelchair-bound Xavier down the stairs.
Marnie’s boyfriend and Hannah’s boyfriend, fifteen years later, fighting over the future of the mutant race. Television is a strange business.
Girls Was Secretly A Franchise Farm Team
The Driver and Abbott pipeline is not even the show’s only genre export. Allison Williams went on to anchor the M3GAN horror franchise, and Donald Glover popped up in season 2 before playing Aaron Davis in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
A Brooklyn dramedy about aimless creatives quietly produced a Sith Lord, a Spider-Man character, a killer doll wrangler, and now both sides of the X-Men’s central psychic war.
Jake Schreier’s X-Men starts shooting next year and opens May 5, 2028. Every Marvel role Driver almost played first is here, and the full D23 reveal is here. Release date, full cast, villain, and every rumor are tracked in our X-Men guide.
