Professor X

The James McAvoy movies show the beginning. Charles grows up rich, meets the shapeshifter Raven as a boy, who becomes his foster sister, and by 1962 he's a mutation expert at Oxford, confident and a little arrogant. That's when he meets Erik Lehnsherr. The two become real friends and gather the first young mutants to take on Sebastian Shaw.

On the beach in Cuba, the friendship falls apart. Erik deflects the bullets fired at the mutants, one of them hits Charles in the spine, and he never walks again. Erik leaves, taking Raven with him, and Charles founds the school on his own.

In 1973 the school is closed and Charles has hit rock bottom. He takes a serum made by Hank McCoy that gives him back the use of his legs, at the cost of his powers. A Logan sent from the future convinces him to use his telepathy again, and Charles helps stop the assassination that would lead to the Sentinels.

Ten years later, in X-Men: Apocalypse, he's kidnapped by the ancient mutant who wants to use his body, and comes out of the fight bald, the way audiences know him. In Dark Phoenix, it turns out he tampered with Jean Grey's memories when she was a child. The truth, combined with the power she absorbed in space, nearly destroys everything, and Charles ends up stepping down as head of the school.

A cameo in X-Men Origins: Wolverine shows a younger Charles, still walking, arriving to rescue young mutants held by Stryker. Decades later, in the original trilogy with Patrick Stewart, Charles runs the school and the X-Men with calm and patience. He uses Cerebro to locate mutants, takes in Logan and Rogue and faces Magneto, whom he respects even as an enemy. In X2, William Stryker captures him and forces him to use a copy of Cerebro to try to kill every mutant in the world.

In X-Men: The Last Stand, Charles tries to contain Jean, who has come back as the Phoenix, and ends up disintegrated by her. A post-credits scene suggests his mind survived in a comatose body. In The Wolverine, he reappears alive in a post-credits scene, alongside Magneto, to ask Logan for help. In Days of Future Past, old Charles works with his younger self to send Logan into the past and save the future.

In 2029, Charles is very old and suffers from a degenerative brain disease. A brain like his, out of control, is a weapon: his seizures paralyze anyone nearby, and one of them, years earlier, killed several X-Men. Logan keeps him hidden and medicated near the Mexican border.

Charles is the one who insists on protecting Laura. During the escape, on a rare quiet night with a family that takes them in, he says it's the best time he's had in a long while. Soon after he's killed by X-24, Logan's clone.

The MCU introduces another version. On Earth-838 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Charles is part of the Illuminati, the group that watches over that world, and gets around in a floating yellow chair that recalls the '90s cartoon.

When Wanda Maximoff storms the group's headquarters, Charles enters her mind and finds that universe's Wanda trapped inside. He tries to free her, but the Scarlet Witch overpowers him, and he dies with his neck snapped.

Charles doesn't appear in Deadpool & Wolverine, but the villain is family. Cassandra Nova, who rules the Void, is his twin sister, with mental powers even more brutal than his and none of her brother's good intentions.

Patrick Stewart is confirmed in the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, which opens December 18, 2026. The plot hasn't been revealed yet.

Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Professor X debuted in The X-Men #1, in 1963, as the team's founder. His friendship and rivalry with Magneto are the backbone of most of Marvel's mutant stories.