UPDATE: One of the actors Connor beat for Cyclops landed a spot anyway. Asa Germann is playing Angel.
Marvel has its team captain, and he is 22 years old. Kit Connor was confirmed as Cyclops at Friday’s D23 X-Men reveal, making official what Deadline reported last week.
He walked out on stage alongside Sadie Sink, Samara Weaving, and the rest of the roster for the May 5, 2028 movie.
Who Is Kit Connor?
Connor is a Londoner who has been working since childhood, with early roles in Get Santa and Mr. Holmes, the voice of Pantalaimon in HBO’s His Dark Materials, and a turn as the teenage Elton John in Rocketman.
The breakout was Netflix’s Heartstopper. As Nick Nelson, Connor became one of the most recognizable young actors on the planet, and he just closed out the role in the Heartstopper Forever movie.
The Career Sprint That Got Him Here
What happened next is the part Marvel noticed. Connor starred opposite Rachel Zegler in Broadway’s Romeo + Juliet, then Alex Garland grabbed him for the A24 war film Warfare and the Elden Ring movie.
That is a teen romance phenomenon, Shakespeare on Broadway, an acclaimed war picture, a giant video game adaptation, and now the MCU inside roughly two years.
Who Is Cyclops?
Scott Summers debuted in 1963’s The X-Men #1 from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and has anchored the team ever since. His mutant power is the problem he can never put down: concussive optic blasts he cannot switch off, held in check only by his ruby visor.
He is the field captain, the true believer in Xavier’s dream, and one half of the great Scott and Jean romance that Sadie Sink’s casting now sets up on screen.
His comic backstory also just became very relevant. Scott grew up in a Nebraska orphanage secretly run by a man named Mr. Milbury, and Marvel just cast Adam Driver as Nathaniel Milbury. The captain’s childhood tormentor is in the movie.
Two Cyclopses In One Year
James Marsden wore the visor across Fox’s original trilogy and reprises the role in Avengers: Doomsday on December 18, where the Fox era mutants get their sendoff. Tye Sheridan played the younger Scott in the 2010s prequels.
So the old Cyclops takes his bow in December while the new one suits up right behind him. Marsden’s version spent three movies losing screen time to Wolverine. Handing the reboot’s captaincy to a 22-year-old, with no Wolverine announced, suggests Marvel intends to fix that. Deadline reads Hugh Jackman’s D23 beam-in as a sign he isn’t coming back for the reboot, either.
Look at the ages. A 22-year-old captain, a 34-year-old Emma Frost, and a 40-year-old Professor X is a team built to grow across a decade of movies.
Connor has since given his first interview about the role, telling GMA that the reboot feels like “a really different version, a different take” from the movies he grew up with.
Jake Schreier directs, cameras roll next year, and X-Men opens May 5, 2028. Watch the full D23 reveal here, and track release date, full cast, villain, and every rumor in our X-Men guide.
