Internet detectives assemble! Last year, writer and producer Simon Kinberg courted speculation by posting a picture of himself with two of his X-Men: Apocalypse cast members, James McAvoy and future Jean Grey Sophie Turner. Also included in the picture: international superstar Taylor Swift, who apparently invited the mutant heroes (and screenwriter) backstage after a concert in Montreal, where the movie was being filmed. Seeing the 1989 star with a bald-headed McAvoy caused the internet to promptly lose its mind, spreading rumors that Swift might appear in the film—which comes out May 18—to the point that Kinberg had to come out and explicitly deny the idea of a cameo. (In September, he told reporters, “It was just a photo backstage at the concert, and that was the only time we ever saw her.”)
Well, apparently nobody told Sophie Turner, a longtime student of the Game Of Thrones school of cruelly messing with fans. The actress fanned the flames today by posting a #FlashBackFriday post on Twitter, with a picture of herself in character alongside Tye Sheridan’s Cyclops. The two are in a record store, where Sheridan holds up an album by Dazzler, a beloved X-Men character who lives a double life as a disco-themed pop star.
So far, we’re still at standard, Stan Lee-cameo levels of fan service here, referencing a well-liked character who’s probably a little too goofy for the film. But Turner also captioned the photo with a T-Swift reference, (“#FBF that time Cyclops and I went shopping at the mall and found our favorite singer’s album (pre 1989, of course)”), igniting speculation that the woman on the album’s cover art might be Swift herself.
Unfortunately, the picture isn’t clear enough to make out who, exactly, is reaching to the sky on the cover of Sounds Of Light And Fury, but it would be pretty clever if Kinberg and company had managed to talk Swift into a quick, in-character photoshoot for the film. But it actually looks like the cover art might be a drawing, suggesting a third option: that the movie’s production staff decided to make fun of the controversy by basing the drawing of Dazzler on Swift, just to mess with us all. We probably won’t know for sure until after Apocalypse hits theaters, and director Bryan Singer does a J.J. Abrams-esque cameo-listing victory tour.