Marvel saved its biggest name for last. At Friday’s D23 X-Men reveal, Adam Driver beamed in via video to announce that he has joined the May 5, 2028 movie as Nathaniel Milbury.
If that name means nothing to you, that is the point. If you read X-Men comics, you already know Marvel just announced its villain while pretending it didn’t.
Nathaniel Milbury is a longtime alias of Nathaniel Essex, better known as Mister Sinister.
Who Is Adam Driver?
Driver, 42, has one of Hollywood’s stranger origin stories. Born in San Diego and raised in Mishawaka, Indiana, he joined the Marines after 9/11, was medically discharged following a training injury before deploying, and then talked his way into Juilliard.
His breakout came on HBO’s Girls, which earned him three straight Emmy nominations. Then Star Wars made him a household name as Kylo Ren across the sequel trilogy.
In between, he built one of the best resumes of his generation: back-to-back Oscar nominations for BlacKkKlansman and Marriage Story, plus Paterson, Silence, House of Gucci, The Last Duel, Ferrari, and Megalopolis. The list of directors reads like a film school syllabus: Scorsese, Spike Lee, Baumbach, Jarmusch, Ridley Scott, Coppola.
The Marvel Courtship Finally Pays Off
Driver circled the MCU for years, including reported talks to play Reed Richards before The Fantastic Four: First Steps went to Pedro Pascal. The complete history of every Marvel role Driver almost played is here.
The rumor mill had him attached to this movie all summer, cycling from Magneto to Mister Sinister, with THR teasing Sebastian Shaw as recently as last week.
The Sinister camp wins. In his D23 video message, Driver said talks with Kevin Feige stretched back years, and that he had finally “found something perfect with characters I feel very deeply about.”
Then he trolled the entire rumor cycle. Alone on an empty Pinewood soundstage, Driver announced he was “very excited to be playing the role of Magneto,” let it sit for a beat, and corrected himself: even better, Nathaniel Milbury.
After a month of Magneto, Sinister, and Shaw reports, the man himself opened with the fake-out. The full video is worth the watch.
Who Is Nathaniel Milbury, AKA Mister Sinister?
Created by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri, Mister Sinister made his full debut in 1987’s Uncanny X-Men #221. In the comics, Nathaniel Essex is a Victorian-era scientist whose obsession with mutation gets him transformed into an ageless monster by Apocalypse.
The Milbury alias is the telling detail. In the comics, “Mr. Milbury” ran the Nebraska orphanage where a young orphan named Scott Summers grew up, secretly experimenting on the boy who would become Cyclops.
That puts Driver’s character directly in the childhood of Kit Connor’s Scott Summers. Sinister’s whole deal is a generations-long fixation on the Summers and Grey bloodlines, which also drags Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey into his orbit.
A Villain Live-Action Has Teased But Never Delivered
Fox spent years teasing Sinister and never pulled the trigger. The Essex Corp briefcase in the X-Men: Apocalypse post-credits scene went nowhere. Deadpool 2 put its kids in the Essex House orphanage and left it at that.
So Driver is the first actor to actually play the character in live action, nearly 40 years after his debut. Animation fans just watched Sinister torment the team in X-Men ’97, which only raised the bar.
The structure of the cast tells you how Marvel sees him. Christopher Abbott’s Professor X is 40, the rest of the roster runs 22 to 34, and the two-time Oscar nominee in the room is playing the monster. That is the movie’s power imbalance in one casting sheet.
There is also a fun wrinkle: Driver and Abbott both broke out on Girls. The full story of how the MCU’s Professor X and its first X-Men villain came from the same HBO comedy is here.
Everything We Know About X-Men
Jake Schreier directs off Thunderbolts*, with cameras rolling next year and the movie opening May 5, 2028 as the first film of the post-Multiverse Saga MCU.
Watch the full D23 Marvel panel here, and catch up on the rest of the team: Samara Weaving’s Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette’s Rogue, and Maya Boyd’s Storm. Release date, full cast, villain, and every rumor are tracked in our X-Men guide.
