Inde Navarrette knows how she wants to walk into the Marvel universe, and it starts with respect. Playing Rogue in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men reboot, she plans to pay homage to the character, trust director Jake Schreier and the Marvel writers, and then, in her words, start “adding my own sauce.”
She shared the approach on The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast. It is a part she has thought about for a while: she met Schreier before her casting was announced, and she admitted the role she had always dreamed of was actually a different mutant, Mystique. Rogue, she explained, is exactly the kind of transformation she loves about acting, the freedom of becoming a completely different person, “one of those people being Rogue, Anna Marie.”
The conversation also covered how she spent the stretch between finishing Obsession and waiting for its release: studying anime. She picked apart why Jujutsu Kaisen plays with timelines while Demon Slayer moves in a straight line, and how an episode’s opening monologue can pay off two episodes later, homework she has folded into her own screenwriting.
Fame itself is newer territory. Obsession turned her performance into a wave of memes, and she happily plays along, texting memes of her own scenes to her dad, even as she keeps her footing by deciding which parts of the attention are, in her words, “none of my business.”
The interview lands in the middle of a remarkable run for Navarrette. Earlier this month she took home the Critics Choice Breakthrough Award, she will be honored at the Newport Beach Film Festival this Sunday as one of Variety’s 10 Actors to Watch, and she hosts Saturday Night Live‘s Halloween episode on October 31. Then comes the X-Men, and her chance to make Rogue her own.