The handsome and talented Adan Canto is recruited to play a Brazilian mutant named Sunspot. Let the controversy begin.
Everybody knows that X-Men: Days of Future Past is premiering this weekend (Thursday night/Friday morning, actually), and almost everybody knows it’s an attempt to use a version of a classic X-Men comic arc to stitch together the two highly disparate version of the X-Men that have appeared in film over the last fifteen years or so. In the middle of the geek-fest stands Adan Canto, playing a young mutant from Brazil who can channel solar energy into super-energy. Or something like that.
There’s been some discussion in the fan- and Latino community about whether or not Sunspot really is a Latino, since he speaks Portuguese rather than Spanish, and whether it’s appropriate that Canto, who was born in Mexico, is the right actor to play him. It smells of fanboy nitpicking in general, and it masks the even less pleasant fact that there are almost no American Latino superheroes in the comics, and even fewer–that is to say, none–in the various film and TV versions of the DC and Marvel Universes.
If you need to catch up on the whole “who is/what is” of the X-Men franchise, enjoy this eight-minute presentation, including a glimpse of Sunspot–whatever his ethnicity–along with a breakdown of the complicated plot. And let’s see just how much of Adan Canto we actually see in a movie that’s filled to the brim and more with super-stars. And we mean that literally.
