Obsession Star Inde Navarette Confirms Meeting With X-Men Reboot Director Jake Schreier

Marvel’s X-Men reboot is still years away, but the casting rumour mill has just been handed its most concrete morsel yet. Inde Navarette, the breakout lead of this year’s horror hit Obsession, has told Nylon that she recently met with Jake Schreier, the Thunderbolts director now steering Marvel’s new take on the mutants, and that she’s genuinely interested in doing a Marvel film. Coverage of the interview was quick to point out what the timing suggests, even if nobody at Marvel is confirming anything.

A meeting, not a contract

Let’s be clear about what has actually happened here. Navarette confirmed a meeting and expressed interest. That’s it. Marvel has announced no casting whatsoever for the X-Men reboot, and studios take these general meetings with rising talent constantly. Most of them lead nowhere.

That said, the circumstances make this one worth watching. Obsession has been hugely profitable at the box office, Navarette is 25, and Marvel is reportedly hunting for younger, more affordable actors to distinguish its new mutants from Fox’s veteran line-up. A breakout genre star in her mid-twenties taking a meeting with the X-Men director is exactly the profile Marvel is said to be after.

Mystique leads the fan-casting

Marvel fans wasted no time assigning her a role, and Mystique is the clear favourite. The argument goes that Navarette’s expressive face would carry emotion through heavy prosthetics, which is half the job when you’re playing a blue shapeshifter. Others have pitched Psylocke, Rogue, Kitty Pryde and Mirage, while some fans reckon Marvel might want an older actress for Mystique if the films lean into her comics history as Nightcrawler and Rogue’s mother.

The counterpoint, as one fan noted, is that Mystique is one of the few characters where age barely matters, since she can look however she wants. Jean Grey, meanwhile, is widely assumed to be spoken for: many fans are convinced Sadie Sink’s secret Spider-Man: Brand New Day role is Jean Grey, a theory Marvel has done nothing to dampen. Sink herself apparently wasn’t told who she was playing until filming started, which tells you how tightly Marvel is guarding this era’s casting.

Where the reboot fits in Marvel’s plans

Schreier’s X-Men film is currently expected around 2028, arriving after Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars close out the Multiverse Saga. Marvel has framed Secret Wars as a soft reset rather than a full reboot, giving legacy Fox X-Men actors a send-off before entirely new versions of the mutants are introduced into a reconfigured continuity — a plan that has already ruffled some feathers among the original cast.

Kevin Feige has been explicit about the direction: X-Men will be ‘a very youth-oriented, focused and cast movie’, with Schreier chosen partly because of how he handled character dynamics in Thunderbolts and his connection to younger audiences. Whether Navarette ends up part of that roster or not, the shape of Marvel’s next saga is coming into focus, and it’s built around exactly her generation of actors.