‘X-Men ’97’ Interview: Jake Castorena Talks Death and The Beloved Animated Series

X-Men ’97 is winding down season 2 and the penultimate episode, “The Dead Man’s Hand,” gave us a return to one of our most beloved X-Men. But his return does come after yet another season of iconic characters sacrificing themselves for the greater good. Which is kind of hilarious when you think about it.

“The Dead Man’s Hand” brought Gambit aka Remy LeBleu back to fans and it is the first big “death” that was rectified. Earlier this season, Magneto was killed by Apolocalypse and we also watched as Magik sacrificed herself. All these deaths are fascinating because they allow fans to theorize what can happen. After all, so many of us thought that Gambit would come back as Death in Apocalypse’s Four Horsemen and we weren’t exactly wrong in thinking that.

But I was lucky enough to talk to supervising producer and head/supervising director of X-Men ’97‘s Jake Castorena earlier this year when Magneto was killed. According to Castorena, the “Marvel Overlords,” as I called them, are the ones who are pitching that some of our favorite heroes are taken out. “The ironic thing is that it comes from Marvel overlords,” Castorena said. “They’re the ones like ‘What if we did this?’ and we go ‘What? Really? Okay!'”

Castorena did then say that Matthew Chauncey is the one who then has to “deal with doing the actual math of how do we kill this character, how do we send them off, or at least giving us those groundworks.”

Fan theories weren’t wrong

One of the big theories for this season was that Gambit wasn’t really dead. The truth is: He was. But Apocalypse used his body to bring him back and his powers were very much to bring death and destruction. We saw as Gambit was building his own army of the dead and it took Charles to bring him back to the world of the living. The episode ends with Gambit back to his normal color and that’s the last we saw of him.

So was this always the plan or how did they work bringing Gambit back? That we don’t have the answer to but it is wonderful getting to see how Castorena and company build the story on X-Men ’97. Even if they do keep killing off our faves (for all our fan theories).

You can see our full chat here:

X-Men ’97 airs on Disney+ every Wednesday.