Apparently, Republicans loved the anti-mutant senator from the first X-Men movie

The first X-Men movie in 2000 kicked off the superhero revolution, but some politicians were into it for all the wrong reasons.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of 2000’s X-Men, the movie that kicked off the superhero craze that is currently consuming Hollywood. No X-Men, no Marvel Cinematic Universe, simple as that.

There’s been a lot of looks back this week at the movie that started it all, with one of the most interesting coming from Inverse, which sat down with actor Bruce Davison. Davison played Senator Robert Kelly, a reactionary politician who used fear-mongering tactics to try and push an anti-mutant bill through Congress.

Watching the movie, it’s pretty clear that Kelly is supposed to be the bad guy, a bigot who’s happy to exploit people’s hatred and fear for his own political gain. But according to Davison, members of the actual US Congress were big fans. “I was spending a lot of time in Washington with the Creative Coalition campaigning for the arts, and they would only send me into the Republican offices because the Republicans would all go nuts over Senator Kelly,” Davison remembers. “It was great, talking to [Kansas Senator Sam Brownback] and his people about, ‘Oh, yeah, Senator Kelly. I can identify with this guy.’”

Unsurprisingly, Brownback wasn’t much into arts funding, but his aides “loved Senator Kelly.” In general, Davison’s role as a movie hate-monger was “a useful door opener in those Bush years,” which…okay. I mean, if you identify with the villain isn’t it time to reexamine yourself a bit?

Brownback went on to be the governor of Kansas, and held the coveted position of least popular governor in the country up until a few years ago. Today, Davison sees Vice President Mike Pence as a stand-in for his X-Men character, and he’s not alone. “I’d rather not be compared to him, but yes, Pence is that guy.”

But don’t worry: Davison has opinions about movies, too. “X-Men was like nothing I’d read or seen before,” he said. “And it was all about the characters. It was all about mutants living in the world. It wasn’t the first, but it followed the genre, which has now sort of gobbled everything up. Now I guess that era is ending too.”

That sound gloomy, but Davison isn’t the first person to wonder if the superhero movie craze can last much longer. He thinks the genre needs something new, “[s]omething that alters your perceptions and suddenly changes the way you look at things. The first X-Men did that. I found the characters all complex and interesting. They were a mystery at the time. We didn’t quite know them, but we knew that they were struggling and they were trying to do something and there was this great conflict beginning to brew.”

Now that Disney has the film rights to the X-Men, we’ll probably see that conflict start up again, but Davison doesn’t think that’s the way to go. “I’m not really interested in what Disney does to refresh the X-Men. They’re just rebranding another story. Come up with a new thought, a new idea, a new character. Stan Lee did it all the time. Go find the Stan Lees in the world and see what they come up with. And then build it all on that.”

That said, he would of course be on board if Disney called him up to reprise his role. “I’d drop dead, I’d be so shocked. I’d be more than happy to do anything that had to do with that, but I certainly ain’t holding my breath.”

I agree that we are awash in superhero stories, and I’m sure the trend will peter out eventually, but right now, the quality is staying fairly high, so we probably have a while to go yet.

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