Cynthia Erivo may still be experiencing a warm round of applause for her performance as Elphaba in 2024’s Wicked, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t already have her sights set on other, future roles. On the contrary, the actress revealed during a recent interview with the National Board of Review that she’d like to follow up her performance in Wicked by playing one of the most iconic female superheroes of all time.
“I really want to play Storm,” Erivo revealed on the carpet for the National Board of Review Awards Gala in New York City. The actress went on to say that she believes the popular X-Men character hasn’t yet been explored as deeply onscreen as she deserves to be. “I know it sounds frivolous, but I think we haven’t uncovered how grand she is and all of that inner turmoil that she has,” Erivo remarked. “So I think there’s a world in which we could do something with that.”
So far, Storm has only been brought to life in live-action form twice: first by Halle Berry in the Fox-produced X-Men films of the 2000s and early 2010s and second by Alexandra Shipp in the prequel movies X-Men: Apocalypse and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. The character has, of course, remained a constant fixture of the animated X-Men movies and TV shows that have been produced over the decades, and Alison Sealy-Smith even recently voiced a variant of Storm in Marvel’s What If…? season 3.
Right now, Storm’s live-action future is a bit unclear. In the years since it acquired the screen rights to the X-Men, Marvel Studios has dropped a few mutant references. However, the studio’s plans for the X-Men within the Marvel Cinematic Universe haven’t yet been publicly articulated, which means no one currently knows when Storm will get to make her live-action debut in the franchise. Whenever Marvel starts discussing that moment, though, they can do so with the knowledge that at least one high-profile actress has already thrown her name into the ring to play the character.
Wicked is now playing in theaters.