The Cast Of X-Men: First Class Talk About Their Characters.

X-Men: First Class charts the epic beginning of the X-Men saga, and reveals a secret history of famous global events. Before mutants had revealed themselves to the world, and before Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time. Not archenemies, they were instead at first the closest of friends, working together with other Mutants (some familiar, some new), to stop Armageddon. In the process, a grave rift between them opened, which began the eternal war between Magneto's Brotherhood and Professor X's X-Men.

"Charles has this connection to everybody because he can feel their experiences and see them. Their memories are his memories. But he wasn't looking for Erik. He didn't know Erik was there and he suddenly felt him. And perhaps he's never connected to Erik in quite the same way he's connected to other people. I think there's a little bit of vying for who's in charge, and there is a feeling between them from Magneto that, 'you've got the brains, but I'm your trump card, pal,' at every venture. 'I'm the most dangerous dude in here, and you know that and I know that,' and I think by the end of the film we come to an understanding about that as well. We do have completely different views as well, and what's quite nice is that those scenes don't come to a nice reconciliation at the end. They're left, so the tension carries on through the movie."

"At the start of the movie we get introduced to Erik as a boy. We start in the concentration camps with him and it cuts to 20 years later and it's the early 60s and it's Erik as a grown man. He's on a quest to get Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon. Shaw had him in these concentration camps - and as we know the Nazis were doing lots of experimentation with all sorts of things like measuring skull size and brain size and running experiments on human beings, essentially. Shaw is trying to unleash this power in Magneto - he's recognised that he can manipulate metal - and so we catch up with Erik on a quest to basically hunt Shaw down."

"Alex Summers, whose super name is Havok, is Scott 'Cyclops' Summers's younger brother. I can shoot plasma beams out of my entire body instead of just optic beams. Just like Scott can't control his power without glasses or his visor on, historically Alex has never been able to control his power either. It's always in outbursts of lack of control. In the comics he has a suit that kind of absorbs excess energy. But it was more like a meter that told him how much power he had, whereas in this one I have something that channels it because I can't control it myself. It's a chest piece that focuses the ray so I don't blow it out everywhere."

"He's a young scientist - a very clever guy - but a little bit shy and awkward around the girls and just socially awkward around the group. He's a good guy, but it's hard work for him. He's a great scientist though and he comes up with all of these inventions that sometimes work and sometimes don't, and then he tries out a serum from Mystique's (pictured left) DNA to try and stop his feet from appearing apelike and massive, because he's very self-conscious about it. Unfortunately that goes wrong and he becomes the Beast that we know from the other films and cartoons and comics. It's fascinating to see the difference, when he becomes the Beast, between Hank and this very animalistic and scary-looking character."

"Darwin gets his nickname from Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of evolution. My character is in a constant state of evolution. It's called reactive adaptation - so whatever environment he's in, in order to survive he will mutate. If he gets thrown in water, all of a sudden he might have gills. The lights go out, he'll have 20-20 vision in the pitch black. He's the coolest one! What I like about my character's powers is that a lot of the X-Men have very cool powers, but with this one you actually see it happening and you see why it's happening. In the right circumstances you see the thought behind the character and the need to create that evolution. There's logic to it. And the possibilities are endless with good writing.

"Banshee's got a supersonic scream, and he learns how to fly in this movie. He learns how to melt objects. In the beginning all he really knows is how to break things - car doors I'm guessing, things like that. And he's got selective hearing. In the comics it seems like they reinvent him over and over again. He's always pretty smart, it seems like. He's mostly good. The script definitely defines him more than the comics do, because I've got to do what the script says. I try to add as much as possible. I know there's a love connection in the comics with Moira, so I try to look at her just a little bit differently, you know, when I can, so for any of the fans watching, they can notice that."

"Angel Salvadore is a go-go dancer who can fly. I have a pair of tattooed wings on my back, which turn into insect wings, and I projectile vomit acid. I get to do that a few times. She starts out on the good side with Professor X and Magneto - they recruit her to be an X-Man, and then she switches to Sebastian Shaw's (Kevin Bacon) side to be in Hellfire. I think it's just a different approach to fighting for human equality. Someone compared the two different sides. In this film it's Hellfire and the X-Men, but later it's Xavier and Magneto and someone compared it to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They're really fighting for the same thing, but it's different approaches for how to get there. I think she just believes that the aggressive side is the right side."

"He's a bad guy. Kevin Bacon's got a team of freaky sidekicks, one of them being the fantastic January Jones, and one of them being the not so fantastic bright red Jason Flemyng, and also Alex Gonzalez who plays Riptide. And latterly in the film we recruit Zoe Kravitz as well. They're just goons, but my skill, if I have any skill at all, is to make something out of what on paper isn't too much. If I do a day and I've added a line or nicked a close up, I'm happy with myself. As the days progress, because it's a long film, I'm sort of happy with how the part is developing. Matt (Vaughn, director) keeps coming up to me and saying, 'Flemyng, all the second unit stuff I get back, you're speaking. You haven't got any lines - why are you speaking?!'"

"Moira works for the CIA. In the comics she's a genetic, mutant expert scientist, and she was in the third film - Olivia Williams played her - but in this incarnation she works for the CIA and early on gets involved with Charles Xavier, discovering mutants. She knows that he's an expert on genetic mutation, so she seeks him out and they become allies. She's a real pioneer woman. It's set in '62 and she's in the CIA so it's very new for women to have that opportunity. She's working in a pretty misogynistic place, so she's got a lot of guts and she's driven."