Famke Jansen Breaks Silence on MCU Debut in Avengers: Doomsday

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Deana Carpenter is a Movies & TV News Reporter at CBR. Before joining the team, she worked for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Almanac and spent more than 15 years as a freelance newspaper reporter. With a background in journalism and media, she brings strong reporting experience and a passion for storytelling to her coverage of film and television.

The upcoming Avengers: Doomsday will have no shortage of star power, with actors from several Marvel Cinematic Universe movies set to appear in the Phase 6 film. Doomsday will also mark a huge crossover with Fox’s X-Men, and many actors from the franchise are set to make their MCU debut.

Now that the MCU owns the rights to X-Men, fans can expect to see Magneto, Professor X, and Mystique in 2026’s Doomsday. Now that the movie has finished filming its principal photography, ScreenRant chatted with original X-Men star Famke Janssen about how she feels about her former co-stars now appearing in an MCU movie. Janssen memorably played Jean Grey in the original X-Men trilogy.

Janssen touched on how she felt when she learned that many of her X-Men co-stars, like Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, and Alan Cumming would all be returning to the big screen in Doomsday. “Yeah, to be honest with you, I don’t really know the storyline, so I’m not sure. It’s not my world, it’s never been my world, really, that whole comic book world. I should know by now, I’ve been in it long enough. But I’m really excited to see when it comes out. Just like everyone else, I’ll find out what those storylines are and how it all ended up,” Janssen said.

Janssen, who is starring in the new Netflix series Amsterdam Empire, added that the X-Men movies were “great films to be a part of, and they’ve done so many good things for my career.” She added, “It’s just amazing that over all these years, I’ve had these franchises, like the X-Men, or Taken for three films, or the Netflix series, Hemlock Grove, for three seasons, or Amsterdam Empire and a Bond film.”

“It’s (amazing) being part of these, but then having the variety constantly works for me, I’m really not good at repeating anything,” said Janssen, who has yet to be added to the cast of Avengers: Doomsday. Janssen’s last appearance as Jean Grey was in 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. In that movie, the timeline reset and undid her death, which had happened in the 2006 movie X-Men: The Last Stand.

Marvel’s Doomsday Casting Announcement Broke Records

While Janssen has not been added to the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said at CinemaCon in April that there were still multiple casting announcements left for the movie. Those announcements also include secret cameos. Marvel’s March 2025 official casting announcement for Avengers: Doomsday set a record for the number of views during its livestream with 275 million digital views.

The cast of the movie, in addition to the X-Men stars, will also feature Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, and a slew of other MCU mainstays.

Avengers: Doomsday will hit theaters on Dec. 18. 2026. The film is being directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo from a script co-written by Stephen McFeely and Michael Waldron, based on the Marvel characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.