Marvel’s new Cyclops has spoken, and his first words on the job draw a line between this X-Men and the ones he watched as a kid.
Kit Connor sat down with Good Morning America alongside his castmates after Friday’s D23 reveal, and the clip is now making the rounds on X.
“A Really Different Version, A Different Take”
“I grew up with the original movies in a lot of ways, and it’s really cool because it also feels like we are doing a really different version, a different take, which is really exciting,” Connor told GMA, which saw new Storm actress Maya Boyd nod in agreement.
Connor is 22, born four years after Fox’s first X-Men hit theaters, so “grew up with” is literal. The trilogy that made James Marsden’s Cyclops famous for the wrong reasons was his childhood.
Jake Schreier backed him up in the same GMA sit-down, saying the earlier films were great and that the goal now is to find the things that haven’t been shown recently from other corners of the X-Men universe.
Add Kevin Feige telling the D23 crowd that more casting is still to come, and “different” is starting to sound like the operating principle rather than a soundbite.
Why “Different” Matters For Cyclops Specifically
No X-Man has more to gain from a clean break than Scott Summers.
Marsden’s Cyclops was the team leader on paper and a supporting player in practice, sidelined behind Wolverine across three films and written out early in The Last Stand.
That is the gap a character-first script closes. Writer Lee Sung Jin told Deadline that he and Joanna Calo are leading with what makes these characters tick and “universally relatable” before plots and world stakes, the approach we covered as the X-Men being for everybody, and Cyclops is the X-Man Fox never gave that treatment.
Fans have wanted a Cyclops-forward X-Men for two decades. Marvel just handed the captaincy to a 22-year-old with no Wolverine cast, and Deadline reads Hugh Jackman’s D23 beam-in as a sign he isn’t coming back for the reboot.
The villain is built around him, too.
Adam Driver’s Nathaniel Milbury is the man who ran the orphanage Scott grew up in, and Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey puts the Scott and Jean romance at the center of the roster from day one.
Connor got the part after a competitive round of tests following the Fourth of July, per Deadline, with Feige and Schreier meeting several candidates before landing on the Heartstopper star. Our full Kit Connor breakdown is here.
Two Cyclopses In One Year
The “original movies” Cyclops isn’t done yet.
Marsden reprises the role in Avengers: Doomsday on December 18, and told Vanity Fair this month that it’s been “a nice little homecoming to a role that really put me on the map.”
He is even getting the comic-accurate suit this time instead of the black leather, which he told Jimmy Kimmel was so tight it barely let him move.
So the old Cyclops takes his bow in December, and the new one, by his own description, starts from somewhere else entirely.
Cameras roll next year and X-Men opens May 5, 2028. Watch the full D23 reveal here, and meet the rest of the first group: Christopher Abbott’s Professor X, Samara Weaving’s Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette’s Rogue, and Maya Boyd’s Storm. Everything else on the movie lives in our X-Men guide.
