Shioli Kutsuna's Yukio is a minor highlight of Deadpool 2 as she quickly takes to the Merc with the Mouth and is revealed to be Negasonic Teenage Warhead's girlfriend. However, while we all assumed that the actress - who is credited as "Yukio" - is a slightly different take on Surge, it turns out that writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick actually based her on a Chris Claremont creation.
There's only one Yukio in the X-Men comic books and she was a Japanese assassin who actually showed up in The Wolverine back in 2013. However, seeing as that movie is no longer canon after the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the scribes seemed okay with rebooting her for Deadpool 2.
"That’s not right," Reese responded when asked about the theory Yukio is really Surge. "She’s a super-minor character. The character’s name is actually Yukio, an assassin — but who’s an adult assassin, so we just aged her down. She’s such a minor character, we thought we could pretty much get away with anything." A minor character? That's definitely debatable, especially after Rila Fukushima played a far more comic accurate version of the hero who has actually been a big part of Wolverine's life.
"Shioli's amazing," Reese added, "I really think we have to do her more justice going forward — not as though we did her injustice, but she just didn’t have a lot of screen time. I’d love to explore the Yukio character more." Whether or not she'll factor into X-Force remains to be seen but fans have responded positively to Yukio despite the fact she's been changed a great deal from page to screen.
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