It’s Thursday morning at GQ Heroes 2024, and rows of Emma Corrin fans have gathered beneath a giant, sun-drenched tent to hear the actor in conversation. Corrin has just returned from Glastonbury, where they surprised themself by screaming along to Keane, as well as nearly getting crushed in the Avril Lavigne crowd and being blown away by Little Simz.
With a villainous part in Marvel's next big swing Deadpool & Wolverine, the actor has taken a sharp left turn away from the types of roles that shaped them
Now though, it’s back to business. They’re here to talk about Deadpool & Wolverine, the third film in the Deadpool franchise, out later this month. Those who know Corrin’s work will know them for their incredibly varied filmography, with roles from Princess Diana in The Crown’s fourth season to pink-haired hacker Darby Hart in 2023 thriller miniseries A Murder at the End of the World.
Deadpool & Wolverine’s supervillain Cassandra Nova, however, might be their weirdest role to date. “It was a great baptism by fire into the world of comedy,” they told the crowd. “With Cassandra, it’s very much not purposeful comedy – she doesn't mean to be funny; she's quite odd, and that was fun to play with.”
In the Marvel comics, Cassandra Nova is a terrifying presence, a parasitic lifeform born bodiless on the astral plane. She literally dreams of destruction and genocide. To bring this complicated, sinister character to life, Corrin took inspiration from Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 war flick Inglourious Basterds. “One of the first times that I talked to Ryan [Reynolds] in detail about Cassandra, he brought up Inglourious Basterds and Christoph Waltz’s character in that,” Corrin remembers.
“He plays a Nazi [Hans Landa] who visits this Jewish family’s home, and he’s so evil. He’s wearing the Nazi uniform, and because he’s wearing this uniform he can sit there and drink this glass of milk and act like just he’s come round for a drink and a gossip, and it’s so sinister because he’s not playing up to the fact that he’s a villain. That was a reference because they really wanted Casandra to feel like the opposite of what you’d expect a villain to be like. That was really intriguing for me. That was the first thing that really hooked me into that role of toying with people's expectations of what a villain should be like… That's even more insidious.”
For Shawn Levy, the director, it was really important for audiences to “see the weather change” with this character, says Corrin. “You think it’s sunny and then suddenly the clouds come and… you're dead.”
