Adam Driver says X-Men was the "right time" for him to finally join the MCU

Driver swung by Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday to promote James Gray’s new drama Paper Tiger, which was the topic of the evening until his host switched gears to Marvel. Kimmel made mention of Feige’s repeated attempts to cast Driver in other projects—in which the two would meet on Zoom, discuss Feige’s pitch, and log off for a few days, only to log on again for Driver to tell him no—before asking why X-Men “jumped out” at him over everything else. “I was a fan of the other things, too, but this one felt like a right time—and then, it’s X-Men,” Driver said. As it happens, the actor who embodied Kylo Ren for three Star Wars films (not four, sadly) is an X-head from way back. “I was a big X-Men fan when I was a kid,” he told Kimmel. “The TV show was right in my generation. It’s huge for me. Me and my cousin, Tony—y’know, he would be Sabretooth, and I would be Wolverine. It’s a big deal.”

But it wasn’t just Driver’s childhood love of the X-Men that drew him to the project. The director, Jake Schreier (Thunderbolts*, Netflix’s Beef), had an idea that appealed to him—and, of course, any chance to appease Kevin Feige at last certainly played a part in his taking on Sinister’s complicated high-collar cape. “It all came together. The script is really cool,” he explained. Naturally, as an actor who has appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, he knows little will protect him from criticism—not his impressive resume, not even his nerdy bona fides—if his neXt movie turns out to be a dud. “A lot of people are going to watch it, and if it’s bad, people will see you being bad,” Driver said. “I don’t want to mess it up.”

You can watch Driver’s appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in the video below. (The X-Men comments begin at 3:40.)