Some actors make their name playing iconic villains, but others become pop culture icons by playing villains that are impossible to hate. Rebecca Romijn played one of the most notorious shapeshifters ever put on film, but even before that, she was stealing hearts as one of the ‘90s most prolific femme fatales.
Now that Romijn is set to reprise one of her most memorable roles in Avengers: Doomsday, it would be the perfect time to look back at how she’s managed to keep her career fresh all these years. A rocky marriage and a genuine rollercoaster of opportunities later, Romijn stays as relevant now as she’s always been – and looking just as great in her fifties.
Before She Was Blue: The Roles That Built Rebecca Romijn
The year 2000 would mark a definite turning point for Romijn’s career, as she joined the cast of X-Men as the deadly femme fatale/shapeshifter Mystique. But before her career made that meteoric ascent, she was already appearing in some of the most notorious shows and films of the ‘90s.
Her first major mainstream role was in Friends, where she played a girl with a dirty apartment who falls in love with Ross. A decade of modelling work meant that Romijn turned heads in each role. She even played a fictionalized version of herself in the first Austin Powers movie in 1999 – one year before her career truly took off.
From Mystique to Multiverse: How Romijn Became a Marvel Constant
After she became Mystique in X-Men, all eyes were on Romijn. That role proved she was brilliant at playing deliciously evil characters and uniquely complex characters, earning her starring roles in movies like Femme Fatale and Godsend. X-Men also marked the first in a long list of Marvel and DC films for Romijn, including The Punisher, the remaining X-Men films in the original trilogy, and voicing Lois Lane in recent DC animated feature films.
In the early 2000s, Romijn frequently shared the screen with her then-husband, John Stamos. The Full House star married Romijn in 1998. While the couple appeared happy enough on the surface, their 2005 divorce shocked their fans. That said, the real bombshell would fall almost twenty years later, when Stamos released his autobiography, If You Would Have Told Me, in 2023.
The Divorce, the Memoir Bombshell, and the Comeback Nobody Saw Coming
Romijn and Stamos’s marriage, which seemed perfect on the surface, was actually filled with more drama than it looked. As he revealed in his memoir, Stamos was growing increasingly jealous of Romijn’s career, confessing that he felt “emasculated” by her success.
After their divorce, Romijn married the actor Jerry O’Connell in 2007, and the couple has been together since. The late 2010s also gave Romijn a chance to find a new audience with Star Trek: Discovery and, more recently, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Now, at 53, Romijn is ready to turn blue once more, as she will reprise her role as Mystique in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, returning to her most iconic role twenty years later.
