James McAvoy Says No Shared Scenes With Patrick Stewart… What Kind of Time Travel Movie Is Days of Future Past?

Alright, I’m just as well versed as the next person in the tropes of time travel fiction. I know the perils of running into your past self in a setting where changing the timeline can have disastrous consequences, compared to settings where changes in the past simply split off parallel universes or where changing the past is impossible because if you change it then you’ll never have needed to come back to change it and then you won’t have changed it so you’ll have to come back to change it but then you’ll never have come back to change it so then it won’t have changed so you’ll go back to change it but then it won’t have changed so…

James McAvoy says he has no shared scenes with Sir Patrick Stewart.

He told Empire: “I don’t think we get any scenes together, sadly. I don’t think there’s any future self talking to past self.”

I find this odd, because movies don’t generally announce that they’ve hired actors just to play small parts in the early part of the production. That sort of thing is usually left to the post scripting stages. Cameos might not even be revealed until the movie is released, a la Liam Neeson in The Dark Knight Rises. Days of Future Past making sure that it has Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen on the books for the movie would indicate that the two actors have a part to play that can only be done in person (and not, for example, by really unconvincing CGI double, a la Wolverine Origins) and cannot be written out of the script.

So aside from the disappointment of not getting to see Stewart and McAvoy (and possibly also Michael Fassbender and McKellan) face off across time, it leaves me wondering exactly how much interaction there’s going to be between the present X-Men and the past. Granted, Professor X and Magneto are so far the only past-present pairs to be confirmed for the movie (Well… I suppose technically Hugh Jackman could play both a past and present version of Wolverine) so the fact that they don’t interact doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be much interaction. I’d almost be more interested in a movie that was about two X-Men teams trying to save the world while interacting as little as possible because “time problems.”

I do wonder how they’ll chose to make the joke about what happens to the young professor’s hair, however.

(via Digital Spy.)