Trailers for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have strongly hinted that Sir Patrick Stewart would reprise the role of Professor X in the movie, and if you've seen it, you'll now know that did indeed happen. Wearing a green suit and in the yellow floating wheelchair from the comic books, the actor looked like he'd been pulled straight out of X-Men: The Animated Series.
The truth, of course, is that this Charles Xavier hailed from Earth-838, the home of The Illuminati (you can find an in-depth breakdown on each member of that group right here).
Ultimately meeting a violent death at the hands of the Scarlet Witch, this Professor X's story has clearly ended, but Stewart was all too happy to come back to die all over again. "The last [movie] that we did with Hugh Jackman, when the two of us were very, very different people from the characters that you'd met in earlier X-Men movies," he tells EW of his role in 2017's Logan. "I thought that brought down the curtain on my character and Hugh's character very effectively."
"But the world of comic books is much bigger than I ever imagined," the actor added.
Surprisingly, Stewart isn't viewing this as the final time he plays Charles and clearly feels the door is still open for another Variant of the X-Men's leader to show up down the line following this cameo. "It's possible and likely that there may be even more [appearances]. I don't expect ever to be Jean-Luc Picard again, but there is potential maybe for a reappearance of Professor Xavier."
It all depends on what Marvel Studios has planned for the X-Men. If they're going to be part of the MCU as Variants, then using Stewart again makes sense. However, if the plan is to reboot the characters, then it might be a smarter decision to cast a younger actor to lead this team of mutants.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now playing in theaters.