Ray Wise Joins The Cast Of 'X-Men: First Class'

Briefly: Ray Wise is one of the more imposing actors around. Though he sometimes gets cast in middling fare, the man retains a powerful sense of presence and is always a welcome sight. Twin Peaks and RoboCop fans will never forget him, but there are a great many entertaining performances in his long career. (I'll get pulled into a fairly silly thriller like Dead End just because he's in the cast.)

Now Mr. Wise has been cast in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, as a senior government official. The actor told IGN "I'm playing the Secretary of State of the United States. I'll be going over there in the next couple of weeks," and added that he might "touch on" a few sequences involving significant visual effects. If Henry Peter Gyrich hadn't already appeared in X-Men I would hope that might be his character. I've avoided screeners of the Twin Peaks episode of Pysch (a little leery of it, being a big Peaks fan) but I'll be quite happy to see him on screen with James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender and more in First Class.