Dancer-turned-actor Sofia Boutella brings a lithe grace to her performances that has scored her roles in high-profile movies including Kingsman, Star Trek Beyond and, most recently, The Mummy.
But it turns out that early plans for the first film from the new Universal monster franchise Dark Universe had a male antagonist.
"In terms of the Mummy story, and figuring out how to craft that, we developed several drafts where the Mummy was a man," director Alex Kurtzman told Digital Spy. "And there were interesting story elements to it, but it was never different enough. A voice in my head had been saying, 'Make it a woman'."
Deciding to make the titular monster into Princess Ahmanet – a woman with a dark but not altogether unfamiliar backstory (when you look beyond her transformation into an undead mummy, that is) – proved to be a turning point for the filmmaker.
"When I listen to that, this incredible story kind of laid itself out," he said. "To me, it does what I believe is the core tenant of the Universal monsters, which is that you must fear the monster and sympathise with the monster at the same time.
"I knew that no matter how evil Ahmanet becomes over the course of the film, if you deeply sympathise with the moment at which she made the choice to go dark, you will always connect to what I feel is the most important about the monsters."
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The decision to make the first Dark Universe monster female can't help but feel progressive in a Hollywood where women are still treated like a minority. Take Marvel, whose MCU is almost a decade old without a single female-led movie to date.
"It's not really a statement for or against anything that Marvel has done, or really anyone else has done – because I'm a fan of their films," said Kurtzman. "It's more that I think it spoke to what I like to see in film.
"I like to see strong women in film. I like to see characters who have real, true, deep, honest motivations. And I think one of the things about the monsters in general is that they're so human, ironically. I think that's part of why they've been enduring for so long.
"I love that there's a political statement. I love that we've been traveling the world and people have been saying, 'Yay, strong women!' That's great. It makes me really happy. Certainly, it was part of what I wanted to do in this film.
"But more than anything, I really wanted to tell a unique and original monster story, and I thought it was very interesting to say, 'Well, did what happen to her 5,000 years ago... could that happen now? Is it not so far from where we are? Even though everything's changed, has anything changed?' I think that's an interesting side question."
Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Courtney B Vance and Russell Crowe also star in the movie.
The Mummy will be released on June 9.
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