Emma Corrin goes inside the mind of “Deadpool & Wolverine” villain Cassandra Nova (exclusive)

"The Crown" Emmy nominee says director Shawn Levy and Ryan Reynolds wanted the role to be "super unpredictable."

Emma Corrin received one of the more unexpected text messages of their life prior to signing on to Deadpool & Wolverine: "Don't hang up. It's Ryan Reynolds."

"I think I'm going to frame it," the Emmy nominee of The Crown tells Entertainment Weekly. "I was watching TV with my flatmates quietly at night and just got a buzz on my phone. I screamed. It was a mad, mad text to get."

Moments later, the actor, who uses they/them pronouns, found themselves shooting the s--- with Reynolds about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the character of Cassandra Nova, an extraordinarily powerful psychic and a primary villain — or, rather, one of those grey-area adversaries — in Deadpool & Wolverine. "Ryan's one of the most generous people in terms of the way he observes you," Corrin remarks of their now-costar. "He's very considerate."

Related: How the cameo-stacked Deadpool & Wolverine carves out a new future for Marvel's mutants

The Cassandra Nova of Marvel Comics is a complex figure. She's presented as the evil twin sister of Professor Charles Xavier (played in the previous X-Men movies by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy), but she's technically a Mummudrai, a bodiless alien parasite that appeared to baby Charles in utero, copied his DNA, and birthed as his ultimate opposite. Her origins in Deadpool & Wolverine are being kept under wraps for the time being, but we know some things.

Reynolds' Deadpool and Hugh Jackman's Wolverine cross her path in a wasteland of sorts that contains the wreckage of the 20th Century Fox logo (one of many self-referential nods to the previous studio that owned the film rights to the X-Men characters). Cassandra formed a lair out of the dead body of Ant-Man's giant form and now appears to lead a group of mutants, including Aaron Stanford's Pyro (from X2: X-Men United and X-Men: The Last Stand) and Tyler Mane's Sabretooth (from X-Men).

Corrin's Cassandra Nova arrives on the scene in a comics-accurate ensemble: a high-collared, floor-length beige jacket that "you could swish like a tail," the actor says; a crisp, white button-down shirt; high-waisted pleated pants; riding boots that made Corrin feel "so powerful;" a bald cap; and "huge, long fingers." ("Makeup [department] just hated me," Corrin jokes. "I'd constantly lose a nail, and fingers would fly everywhere.")

Related: Deadpool & Wolverine director teases cameos: 'There's a lot of characters'

They explain of the role, "Ryan and Shawn [Levy, director] pitched this idea, which I was totally on board with: 'We want this villain to not be a villain in the sense that you expect them to be. We want you to be so endeared by her, so charmed by her, and just when you think that maybe she's totally seen into your soul and you are going to be best friends for life, you're dead.'"

Reynolds and Levy conjured up the image of Christoph Waltz's Nazi colonel Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds, in that "he's so disarmingly polite and nice and unaffected, and it's really creepy," Corrin notes. "It's all the more sinister because he doesn't need to do anything.” Meanwhile, the actor themself threw out Gene Wilder of Willy Wonka fame.

"They wanted her to be super unpredictable," Corrin says of Ms. Nova. "Shawn used to say this thing about, we want to see the weather change. She can play the sun, and then the clouds come, and you have no idea when it happened or what just happened."

Related: Watch Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman recap the Deadpool movies — and their X-Men Origins

That's bad news for the Merc with a Mouth and his mutant comrade with an adamantium-coated skeleton. Six years after the events of 2018's Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson is taken for a ride across the Marvel multiverse, setting him on a path to meet Logan, a version of Wolverine from an alternate reality who lost everything.

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Corrin teases that their scenes with Reynolds and Jackman get "a bit heavier" deeper into the movie. "You really see the switch, which I really appreciated in Logan," they say, noting Jackman's 2017 movie, initially meant to be his Wolverine swansong before he came out of retirement for Deadpool & Wolverine. "It's big, deep, deep feelings in these characters and their values and what they go through and their traumas. I was like, 'Wow! There's a whole universe here that has come before and a universe that will come after.'"

Deadpool & Wolverine will open in theaters this July 26.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.