The supersized cast for Avengers: Doomsday features plenty of returning Marvel stars, including the Fox-era X-Men.
Rebecca Romijn is back as Mystique, alongside the likes of Ian McKellen as Magneto, Patrick Stewart as Professor X, and Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler. But, according to Romijn, this might be a slightly different version of her X-Men character to the one we're used to – at least when it comes to makeup.
"First of all, it was a call that I was not expecting at all. And it was my very first question: 'Let's talk about the makeup process.' It is a slightly different take [in Doomsday]," she told Inverse. The makeup used to take a whole nine hours, so it's understandable that might have been a sticking point.
"And of course I jumped at it; I couldn't wait to do it again," she continued. "It was also interesting because when I played her the first time, I didn't have ownership. At the very beginning, I had impostor syndrome. I was young. Like, I was really young, and I was like, 'Oh, maybe I was just the girl who happened to be available.' I had to audition, but I really was like, 'This is a fluke. They're about to find out that I have no business being here.' But that was just me in my youth. We've all gone through that. I didn't have that at all this time going back. I went back in with so much ownership of her this time, and that was delightful."
In the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, we see Romijn's Mystique face off against Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova – and even take the Black Widow's face.
"Nine hours every day, yeah," Romijn said of the old Mystique makeup in the same interview. "I'd go in at midnight to be ready at 9 a.m., and then I would want to shoot as much as possible. I would end up shooting like maybe 15 hours, and then it would take another three or four hours to take everything off."
"So I'd work like 24 hours straight, and then I'd have to have 24 hours off in between so that my skin could breathe because underneath all those prosthetics – which was on roughly 75% of my body – there was nowhere for the sweat to go when I was doing all the action stuff. And so I would blister underneath my prosthetics, and I would have to take 24 hours off in between with healing salves."
"But it was worth it," she added. "I'm telling you, that makeup process and that costume was the most beautiful costume I've ever seen. Every time we were finished with it, I would look in the mirror and go, 'Wow, guys, it's really beautiful.' But there are parts of it that made me irritable and put me in the perfect headspace to play somebody like Mystique."
Avengers: Doomsday arrives this December 18. While you wait, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows for everything else the MCU has in store.
