Recasting X-Men: 14 Actors Who Need To Replace Singer's Mutants

The X-Men franchise is in an extremely interesting transitory period at the moment, with X-Men: Apocalypse seeing the likes of Jean Grey, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Storm all being recast with actors in their early-to-mid-twenties.

Meanwhile, the next core X-Men movie, which still has no confirmed shooting date, is reportedly going to be set a further decade forward in the 1990s, bringing these characters extremely close to their ages in the original X-Men trilogy.

How Bryan Singer will handle this in terms of the older cast members remains to be seen, though it's expected that a number of the legacy heroes will end up being recast in either the next movie or the one after.

With that in mind, it's time to consider who could possibly replace these heroes, some iconic, some less so, when the time comes. Some choices are bold, some are so obvious the studios might actually do it, but all these performers would be firm additions to the mammoth franchise as it faces its most awkward growing pains yet.

Here are 14 X-Men actors who need to replace Bryan Singer's mutants...

The timeline is so royally screwed in this franchise that audiences are supposed to believe the 36-year-old (at the time of shooting) James McAvoy was playing a 51-year-old Professor Xavier in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Hilariously, Patrick Stewart was actually much closer to that age when he filmed the original X-Men movie, which just underlines how absurd the aging process is in these movies.

With the belief that Apocalypse brings the McAvoy-Fassbender-Lawrence trilogy to an end, it doesn't seem terribly likely the A-list trio will return, and though Patrick Stewart continues to defy the laws of aging and could probably just about get away with playing Xavier in his 60s for the next core movie, a recast seems a lot more reasonable.

If the gap between McAvoy and Stewart needs to bridged, it's hard to imagine a better choice than Mark Strong: firstly, he's a lot more age-appropriate at 53 years old, he's got an awesome voice, a bald head and a track record of scene-stealing in great movies.

Again, Fox may just go for the known quantity with Stewart once again, but when Stewart's no longer with us further down the line, Strong would be a fantastic replacement for an upper-middle-aged Xavier.