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Alien and Ghostbusters star Sigourney Weaver was in line to play iconic X-Men character Emma Frost, but it never happened

When director Bryan Singer left Fox's X-Men movie franchise, he took our dreams of Sigourney Weaver's Emma Frost with him - we just didn't know it until now

News by Graeme McMillan, Editor

Published on Sat May 17 2025

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Fan-favorite X-Men character Emma Frost made her cinematic debut in 2011’s X-Men: First Class, played by Mad Men and The Last Man on Earth star January Jones — but the morally ambiguous telepath almost made it to screens long before that, with an entirely different (but very famous) actress in the frame to play the role.

“We were going to do X-Men 3 for a little while and our big secret or coup was – and it’s not going to happen so it’s okay [to say] – we wanted to have a character that was Emma Frost, a famous X-Men character. She’s called the White Queen,” screenwriter Dan Harris said in a 2004 interview after stepping away from the project. “We were going to ask Sigourney [Weaver] to be it.”

Harris was part of the writing team for 2003’s X2, AKA X2: X-Men United, alongside Michael Dougherty and David Hayter, and had been part of the team working on ideas for Bryan Singer’s third X-Men movie before the director — and writers — decamped to Warner Bros. to start work on what would become 2006’s Superman Returns.

It’s unknown what Emma Frost would have done in a prospective third X-Men movie, or even what side she would have been on — by 2004, the character, who’d started as a villain when introduced in 1980s’s Uncanny X-Men #129, had joined the X-Men themselves and was something resembling a good guy… if a somewhat reluctant one at times.

The real sin, of course, is that audiences never got to see Sigourney Weaver play Emma Frost, a role that she undoubtedly would have enjoyed and used as an excuse to chew some nearby scenery. File that one away with the Nic Cage Superman movie as a great example of superhero casting that never ended up actually happening…

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Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.