Emma Corrin felt 'pressure' over Deadpool and Wolverine role

Emma Corrin discusses playing Cassandra Nova in Deadpool and Wolverine

Emma Corrin plays Marvel's next big baddie, Cassandra Nova, in Deadpool and Wolverine but the villain's history as Professor X's twin put a lot of pressure on the nonbinary actor, they tell Yahoo UK.

The Crown star wanted to do their best to live up to what Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy did before them on the big screen, so they revisited Stewart and McAvoy's performances in their respective X-Men films. However they admit that it might not have been the best decision because it led to them feeling imposter syndrome.

"[I felt] a lot of pressure. I really question whether I should have gone back and looked at it," Corrin says. "Because also you don't want to get too close to something so you can't make your own version. But I did find it really helpful, I was just really curious.

"Cassandra has power through her [fingers]... but when it's also so interior, when it's telepathy and in your mind, [it was helpful to see] how that has been portrayed before because it's so much of an internal world and they do it so beautifully. I found that really interesting."

Deadpool and Wolverine sees the Merc with a Mouth (Ryan Reynolds) be tasked with saving the Marvel Cinematic Universe by teaming up with Logan (Hugh Jackman). Corrin's Cassandra thwarts them during their quest to do so, though it is unclear yet how or why this is the case.

Corrin looked to the Marvel comics to inform their portrayal of Cassandra in the forthcoming film, saying that the character's hurt over being abandoned by her brother is the reason behind her villainy.

"I got a sense of them broadly, and then I asked Shawn whether I should lean heavily into taking stuff from the comics for her in terms of character," the actor explains. "But he said, 'you know, it can be useful, but the Cassandra we're creating here... it's up to us to build that cause no one's played her before and it's a very specific universe we're building and her role within that.'

"The thing that I really did take was her relationship with her brother, I needed an emotional hook into the character and that relationship. Maybe feeling like she wanted revenge, like she could never be as good as him, [meant] she became evil.

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"Maybe everything she's doing is sort of for his attention. Does she feel like she's never really known who she is because of his abandonment of her? It's that."

Their experience on the film was ultimately shaped by how Reynolds and Jackman led the production, and the atmosphere they helped cultivate on set: "My first day when everyone arrived, everyone's there in costume and we're all on this incredible built set, it felt so immersive and lifelike, it takes your breath away, it's wild.

"What Ryan has to do —that performance when you, as an actor, you've lost your greatest tool, your face and it you only rely on gesture and physicality— it's incredible. I've found it so interesting and so impressive, and he couldn't be nicer, he was just a lovely person."

While they're no stranger to big productions after making The Crown, Corrin admits there's something "so different" about being in a Marvel movie.

"The scale of this film is huge, but I was expecting it to be more different because I expected a lot of CGI and green screen work" they admit. "I actually didn't have a single scene against green screen, which was amazing. In that sense it was actually relatively similar.

"I think I also expected to feel very overwhelmed a lot of the time, everyone around me has been doing this far longer and playing these roles for so many years —Ryan and Hugh in particular— so I expected to feel quite overwhelmed and quite in awe of everything.

"I really never felt like that, I felt like part of the family and part of the fabric of it very instantly, and was made to feel so comfortable."

Deadpool and Wolverine is out now in cinemas.