Dafne Keen played feral sidekick to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in “Logan,” the character of Laura, aka X-23 — and now we know that she’s set to return in next weekend’s “Deadpool & Wolverine,” thanks to the film’s latest teaser trailer. The actress shared her experience keeping her cameo under wraps, praising Andrew Garfield for showing how it’s done ahead of the release of “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
“All the inspo comes from Andrew Garfield,” Keen told Entertainment Weekly. “He is the master at this.”
Keen (who also starred in HBO’s “His Dark Materials”) was 11 when filming “Logan,” now returning to the broader Marvel franchise at 19.
“I had a great time keeping it secret. I had to do a bunch of press for a job that I just finished,” Keen said — that would be playing Jedi Jecki Lon in “Star Wars: The Acolyte.” “I got asked in every interview, and I just got to lie, which was really funny.”
Her reaction mirrors that of Garfield, who told TheWrap of his Spider-Man lies, “It was rather stressful but also weirdly enjoyable.” He compared it to playing a game of Werewolf with journalists.
“There were moments where I was like, ‘God, I hate lying.’ I don’t like to lie and I’m not a good liar, but I kept framing it as a game,” Garfield said. “And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do. I placed myself in that position of, ‘Well, what would I want to know?'”
Garfield’s conclusion was, “I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job at convincing me he wasn’t in it. And then I would want to lose my mind in the theater when my instinct was proven right.”
While advance leaks ahead of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” including the aforementioned trailer and this article, may make that surprise difficult to fully achieve, Keen has followed a similar path. She shared that, after her agent secretly negotiated for the appearance over the course of more than a month, she got the call that the appearance was happening.
“I immediately screamed,” Keen said. “I dropped my phone in the bath. I had to put it in rice; it was a whole thing.”
The actress told EW that there had been discussions around starring in her own spin-off after “Logan,” but that idea didn’t come to be.
“It was very much a reality that then kind of fell through,” she said. “There were talks of a script being made. I’d heard it was an X-23 [movie]. I dunno how much of what I’m saying is true because I was 11, but this is what I’d heard through the grapevine.”
After Disney bought Fox, previous home of the X-Men franchise, “I was quite sad,” Keen said. She added, “I was like, ‘Oh well, I guess that’s it. That’s life, and I’ll have to move on’ — even though this is one of the greatest characters I’ll ever get to play, and annoyingly, I got to play her at 11! I peaked at 11.”
Despite her excitement in returning to the role, she shared her nerves around reprising her “Logan” role.
“I was like, ‘I will have forgotten how to play her. She’s not in me anymore,'” Keen said.
The now-grown actress did her homework, rewatching “Logan” and trying to pull that early performance out of her memory banks. But she said that, as soon as filming started, “I really felt like we were back doing ‘Logan.’ It was like eight years hadn’t passed.”
You can read Dafne Keen’s full interview with EW, including teases of how both her character and her surrogate father-daughter relationship with Logan have evolved in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” right here. You can also watch the latest teaser trailer, featuring Keen as Laura/X-23, below:
The post ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Actor Praises Andrew Garfield as ‘the Master’ of Cameo Denials: ‘I Got Asked in Every Interview, and I Just Got to Lie’ appeared first on TheWrap.
