The White Queen is official.
Samara Weaving took the D23 stage Friday as Emma Frost, confirming the Deadline report that kicked off Marvel’s casting blitz earlier this month.
She joins the X-Men movie opening May 5, 2028, and she might be the single most on-brand piece of casting on the roster.
Who Is Samara Weaving?
Weaving, 34, is an Australian actress who came up on the soap Home and Away before moving to Hollywood. Yes, she is Hugo Weaving’s niece. Her uncle played the original Red Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger, so this is the family’s second Marvel character who starts out on the wrong side.
Her American breakout came through genre film: The Babysitter, Mayhem, and then 2019’s Ready or Not, where a blood-soaked wedding dress and a shotgun turned her into an instant horror icon.
From Scream Queen To The White Queen
Since then she has bounced between studio fare and prestige: Bill & Ted Face the Music, Nine Perfect Strangers, Scream VI, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, and Chevalier.
This year she returned to her signature role in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a modest theatrical performer that exploded once it hit Hulu, sitting at number one on the platform’s charts for weeks this summer. The 2026 run does not stop there: Over Your Dead Body took a SXSW Audience Award and Carolina Caroline landed a New York Times Critics’ Pick in June.
Worth remembering: the loudest Emma Frost chatter all summer was a Sydney Sweeney fan campaign that cleared 2.2 million views. Marvel went with Weaving instead, and nobody saw it coming.
Who Is Emma Frost?
Emma Frost debuted as the White Queen of the Hellfire Club in 1980’s Uncanny X-Men #129 from Chris Claremont and John Byrne, introduced in the run-up to the Dark Phoenix Saga.
She is a world-class telepath who can also transform into living organic diamond, and her arc from villain to headmistress to X-Man is one of the great redemption stories in comics.
She is also famously entangled with Scott Summers, the affair that detonated the Scott and Jean marriage in the comics. With Kit Connor’s Cyclops and Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey both cast young, a veteran Emma circling that dynamic is a story engine Marvel did not build by accident.
Third Time’s The Charm
Live action has never gotten Emma right. Finola Hughes played her in the 1996 Generation X TV movie, Tahyna Tozzi had a blink-and-miss version in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and January Jones drew shrugs in X-Men: First Class.
None of them stuck. Weaving is the first Emma Frost cast as a genuine centerpiece, and at 34 she is the elder stateswoman of a roster that runs as young as 22.
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, and meet the rest of the team: Inde Navarrette’s Rogue and Maya Boyd’s Storm. Since the reveal, Weaving has been doing her Emma Frost homework with a stack of comics and going viral opposite Cara Delevingne in the “Crazy, Baby” music video.
