In the Universal reboot of the popular movie, The Mummy, Hollywood star Tom Cruise and actress Sofia Boutella played the lead roles. The film was directed by Alex Kurtzman and released in 2017. The actress Sofia Boutella has earlier proven her acting skills with movies like Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek Beyond. In the film, she played the role of an Egyptian princess who unleashed the dark world to become the Pharaoh.
As per reports, the look and gender of The Mummy were supposed to be opposite to what we saw in the movie. The director did that to avoid similarity with the main villain of X-Men: Apocalypse, released in 2016.
The Mummy villain was supposed to be a man
Speaking to CinemaBlend, the film’s director Alex Kurtzman shared how originally the villain was supposed to be male. He also shared about the design and look of the character. Kurtzman said,
“There was a moment when I had sort of rendered a design that I liked for a male version of The Mummy. And in that version of The Mummy, the Mummy had been born with a skin pigmentation that at the time would have made him really sort of an outcast. And I thought it was an interesting backstory because it began to tell the story of someone who had been bullied, which I found topical. I was reaching for a way to make the Mummy a character who is relatable, understandable, and that spoke to issues that we’re dealing with now.”
On being asked the reason for changing the gender of the character for the movie, he shared that it would have become a copy of Oscar Isaac’s look in X-Men: Apocalypse. Kurtzman said,
“I was going down that road, and then I saw the end of Days of Future Past. And they had the character that Oscar Isaac wound up playing as a boy, and it was, I kid you not, the exact same design. And I was like, ‘Oh, man! That is not good!’ And actually it was the catalyst […] I had had that voice in my head for some time to make it a woman, and that was the moment where, the minute I saw that post-credits scene, I went, ‘We have to start over.'”
Oscar Isaac played the role of mummy in the film X-Men: Apocalypse, and a glimpse of him was in the post-credits of X-Men: Days of Future Past Apocalypse.
Sofia Boutella on working with Tom Cruise in The Mummy
Sofia Boutella was immensely thrilled and honored to work with Tom Cruise in the 2017 movie, The Mummy. She shared,
“He taught me a lot on set. It’s observing his dedication. His acting is what taught me the most. He would tell me at length about lenses and anamorphic format and all that sort of technical stuff. I thought, Oh my God, he knows all this shit, and I know nothing. He would never just sit in his chair and watch. He was always hands-on. He was also always early to set. If I were the director, I would love to work with people like him.”
Sofia Boutella shared that Top Gun star Tom Cruise was like a mentor for her in the movie. The movie was made with a budget of $195 million and its box office collection was $410 million.
Source- Screen Rant
