Twenty-five years ago, Marvel brought its mutants to the big screen for the first time in X-Men. Though the movie eschewed the brightly colored spandex costumes of the comics, it remained largely true to the source material, complete with fantastic displays of superpowers and addamantium claws. Yet the most exciting part of the movie happens relatively early, when two elderly men have a conversation in the hallway.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Of course those two men are Professor X and Magneto, powerful mutants who respectively lead the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Moreover they are portrayed by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, two classically trained British actors who spent serious time in the Royal Shakespeare Company. Each brings the full strength of their charisma to the part. In every scene the two actors share, X-Men has a legitimacy and weight that no amount of shared universe-building or special effects could match.A Fractious FriendshipComic book fans came to theaters in 2000 with high expectations for Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto. The two characters were introduced together as fairly bland rivals in 1964’s X-Men #1. But when writer Chris Claremont took over the characters in 1974, he worked hard to transform the two into three-dimensional figures with a complex relationship. While Xavier sought integration between humanity and mutants, Magneto’s experiences during the Holocaust left him convinced that humans could not be trusted.Claremont revealed the depth of this relationship over the course of several years and scores of issues. X-Men does it in a single scene.Shortly into the movie, we find Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) delivering a speech on mutant rights to Congress. Xavier sits in the audience, listening to his student with pride and concern, as does Magneto, waiting for the bigoted Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) to confirm his fears. When Kelly’s rhetoric reveals the worst of humanity, Magneto walks out, and Xavier follows behind.What follows is a thrilling contest, as McKellen and Stewart play up the admiration and antagonism between the two men. “Don’t give up on them,” Xavier pleads. When Erik suggests a comparison between Kelly’s statements and Nazi ideology, Xavier emphasizes progress. “That was a long time ago. Mankind has evolved.”“Yes, into us,” Erik counters with relish. He continues to taunt Xavier, adding ever so carefully a hint of menace to every smile and bit of bravado. ” On the page, the exchange doesn’t feel that different from anything one would find in a random comic issue. But when delivered by Xavier and McKellen, the exchange doesn’t just feel super-heroic. It feels real.Classical and SuperBy the time they met as Xavier and Magneto, Stewart and McKellen had decades of experience delivering bold dialogue on the stage, as both served tenures as members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Furthermore both had experience in genre productions, with McKellen appearing as a bumbling scientist in The Shadow and Stewart serving as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation.That experience gave them not only the chops to embody larger-than-life characters but also stripped them of the self-consciousness that can sometimes creep in when working with silly material. Between that experience and the two actors’ respect for one another, Stewart and McKellen could infuse Xavier and Magneto with a humanity that other performers, then and now, might otherwise ignore.McKellen’s on familiar ground during most of Erik’s hallway conversation with Xavier. Erik’s haughtiness isn’t too different from the arrogance of classical villains like Iago or Richard III, even if the scale of his machinations go much further than any baddie crafted by the Bard. Thus McKellen finds different notes to play simultaneously throughout the conversation, including hints of sadness when he has to tell Xavier to stay out of his way.X-Men may feature a purely noble Xavier, even more so than in the comics (never forget, comic book Xavier is a jerk), but Stewart still finds depth to bring to the character in that very first scene. He switches from exasperation to determination when Xavier tells Erik that he’s looking for hope, punctuated by the solemnity he adds to his final words in the conversation: “old friend.”Regal ReturnsA quarter-century onward, X-Men feels dated. The black leather costumes have aged worse than most superhero outfits, and the special effects at the climax—particularly when Wolverine hurls himself around the Statue of Liberty—look terrible. Without question, the modern MCU and DCU entries are more dazzling in terms of both spectacle and fidelity to the comics. But they’ve rarely matched the gravitas that Stewart and McKellen brought to their parts, a combination of comic book grandiosity and human pathos. It set a tone for the rest of that specific first X-Men; it’s also a tone that so many other superhero movies have lacked. But it was echoed in 2000 during the scene where Hugh Jackman’s Logan treats Anna Paquin as a scared runaway, as opposed to a comedy partner, and it of course returned when Xavier and Erik met again over a plastic chess set.The weight those two brought to that first hallway conversation even carried to the much of the rest of the X-franchise, especially in the incredible scenes where the two men played chess against one another. Even when the two wore post-apocalyptic clothing in a futuristic wasteland in X-Men: Days of Future Past, the two still felt like real people existing in a fantastic world.Stewart has returned to Professor Xavier several times over the past quarter century, sometimes to great effect (Logan) and sometimes perfunctory (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness). Both he and McKellen are set to play Professor X and Magneto one last time, for next year’s Avengers: Doomsday. If they can harness even a fraction of the power they brought to the original X-Men, then the universe-threatening Doomsday will have the depth that it needs.The post 2000’s X-Men and the Lost Gravitas of Xavier and Magneto appeared first on Den of Geek.