10 Times Two Actors Perfectly Executed The Same Character

When Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) landed at the turn of the century, it heralded a new era for both Marvel Comics and comic book movies in general, sparking the beginning of a successful franchise that would lay the groundwork for what would come later with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The leader of the X-Men, Charles Xavier, aka Professor X, was played by Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean-trained actor with his roots in theatre, before becoming an iconic sci-fi figure as Captain Jean-Luc Pickard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Stewart's turn as the sophisticated and powerful superhero would continue through the original X-Men trilogy, before the franchise took a fresh turn with X-Men: First Class (2011), taking the story back in time to the sixties when Charles was a young man and telling the origin story of the X-Men with James McAvoy assuming that role. The next movie, and one of the strongest in the series, X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014) brought the two actors into the same film, telling an engaging story based around time travel and linking the two generations of the X-Men together to great effect.

The series has been able to nicely utilise the two different timelines, focusing on McAvoy’s version progressing through to becoming the present-day Professor X. Elsewhere, Patrick Stewart’s version has appeared at the end of his days in the Wolverine spin-off Logan (2017), and most recently in the mind-bending Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (2022).