Magneto is a character primarily portrayed by Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender in 20th Century Fox's X-Men film series. Based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, he has appeared in eight installments of the franchise. McKellen played Magneto in the original trilogy films X-Men (2000), X2 (2003), and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), in addition to making a cameo in The Wolverine (2013); while Fassbender portrayed a younger version of the character in the prequel films X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), and Dark Phoenix (2019). Both actors' iterations appeared in different time periods in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). McKellen's version of the character will appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Avengers: Doomsday (2026).
As in the comics, Magneto is depicted as a powerful mutant, a subspecies of humans born with superhuman abilities, who can manipulate and generate magnetic fields. He is a Holocaust survivor who regards mutants as being superior to humans, and seeks to enable them to replace mankind as the dominant species on the planet.
Fictional character biography Early life
Erik Lehnsherr was born in 1930. His parents were Jews from Düsseldorf, Germany. During the Nazi regime, the family is taken to Auschwitz concentration camp, where Lehnsherr, then a boy, is separated from his parents, causing him to manifest his mutant power and bend the metal gate separating them until the Germans knock him unconscious. Shortly thereafter, the boy is taken to the office of Dr. Klaus Schmidt in the camp. Schmidt, who had observed Lehnsherr's earlier display, attempted to coerce him to demonstrate his power by having him move a coin. When Lehnsherr is unable to do it, Schmidt has Lehnsherr's mother brought in, and when that does not produce results, Schmidt shoots and kills her. This triggers Lehnsherr to use his powers to crush metal items in the room, killing the German guards by crushing their helmets, and destroying an adjacent laboratory room.
After the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces in January 1945, the young Erik Lehnsherr emigrates to the United States by 1949, arriving at Ellis Island. Later in his life, Erik Lehnsherr had a brief relationship with a woman named Maximoff. For unknown reasons, he left her before their son Peter was born. During this time, Erik hunts for Nazi war criminals across the globe, including Schmidt, whom he tracks down on a cruiser near a dock in Miami. Lehnsherr is surprised by Schmidt's ally, the powerful mutant telepath Emma Frost, who casts him off the ship.
Another telepath, Charles Xavier, is also looking for Schmidt and senses Lehnsherr nearby while probing. Lehnsherr uses his magnetic powers to control the massive anchor and its chain to destroy the ship with, though Schmidt and his compatriot's escape. Xavier rescues Lehnsherr in the water and brings him to Division X, a CIA project to bring mutants over to the side of the US government and prevent them from becoming hostile instead. Lehnsherr learns that Schmidt is himself secretly a mutant who worked with the Nazis out of convenience and has now assumed the identity of Sebastian Shaw and is working with the Russians instead, and the CIA hopes to use their own team of mutants to help in learning what Shaw's plans are and stop him. Lehnsherr also gets to know Raven, Xavier's shapeshifting mutant foster sister, and Hank McCoy, a mutant with a genius intellect. Lehnsherr and Xavier track down other mutants, Havok, Banshee, Darwin and Angel Salvadore until they have a team ready to challenge Shaw.
The group designates the sobriquet of Magneto for Lehnsherr as a codename. Going to the Soviet Union to track Shaw down, the team finds Emma Frost, who is restrained by Magneto. Xavier probes her mind and learns of Shaw's grand plan: to cause a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and other countries to accelerate the mutations of humanity through nuclear radiation, thereby rapidly swelling Shaw's ranks and ushering in a new era of a mutant-ruled planet. After practicing the use of his power further and learning to work with the team, Lehnsherr once again comes face to face with Shaw, who had hijacked a nuclear submarine and is now wearing a telepath-proof helmet designed by the Russians. Lehnsherr agrees with Shaw's ideas of mutant supremacy, but nonetheless makes it clear that he is still on a path of revenge for Shaw's murder of his mother.
Lehnsherr uses his magnetic powers to deprive Shaw of his helmet, allowing Xavier to freeze him. Lehnsherr takes the helmet himself to lock Xavier out while exacting his revenge on Shaw: using the very coin that Shaw once tried to make the young boy move, he forces it into his brain, killing him. He then addresses his team and Shaw's compatriots as his mutant brothers and sisters, using the missiles sent out by Soviet and American battleships now working together, turning them against the fleet. Xavier wrestles with Lehnsherr, making him lose control of the missiles and saving the men on the ships. Lehnsherr acknowledges the incompatibility of his and Xavier's philosophies and leaves Division X and the X-Men and embraces his mutant identity of Magneto.
He then frees Emma Frost from her military prison, hoping that she can replace Xavier as his new ally. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Erik Lehnsherr is captured by the government and imprisoned in a prison made of concrete beneath The Pentagon. He had in fact been trying to save the president, who he had learned was a mutant himself, but could not fully control the bullet and it still hit and killed Kennedy.
Due to the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), the X-Men film series branches off into two separate timelines starting in 1973.
Original Earth-10005 variant
In the original timeline, Lehnsherr and Xavier together later convince the young Jean Grey, a mutant girl of incredible power, to enroll for the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. Some time before the events of X-Men (2000), Magneto discovers that Hans von Shank, a Nazi war criminal whom he recognizes as one of his chief tormentors in Auschwitz, is still alive and imprisoned; he breaks into the old man's prison cell to kill him, but Xavier shows up and talks him out of it. However, Magneto's "mercy" is merely a ruse, as he secretly sends his lackey Sabretooth out to kill the man anyway shortly after. In the 2000 film, Magneto has Mystique and Toad capture Senator Robert Kelly, a vehement hater of mutants, and subject him to a massive dose of electromagnetic radiation which mutates him and later, unbeknownst to Magneto, kills him. This is merely Magneto's trial for a greater plan of mutating many of the world's heads of state at an international meeting on Ellis Island. The massive expenditure of his mutant powers necessary to power his machine for this purpose would kill Magneto, so he instead attempts to use the young mutant Rogue to channel her powers, which would kill her in his place. When the X-Men try to explain to Magneto that his plan will actually kill the world leaders, turning the whole world against mutants, he refuses to listen, but his plan is foiled by Wolverine and the X-Men, and Magneto is imprisoned in a specifically built prison of plastics.
In the sequel X2 (2003), Magneto is still a prisoner and is forced by the mutant-hating colonel and military scientist William Stryker to tell what he knows about Cerebro and Xavier's operations. Shortly after, Xavier visits him in his cell in person, but Stryker betrays Xavier and has him sedated and captured. Not long after, Magneto escapes after Mystique injects a security guard with excess iron. In order to stop Stryker, he and Mystique joins forces with the X-Men to save his old friend Xavier from Stryker's forces. They raid Stryker's military base, neutralizing the soldiers there. Stryker nearly succeeds in having his mutant illusionist son Jason trick Xavier into killing the world's mutant population with a specifically built copy of Cerebro, but Magneto is immune to their telepathic powers due to his helmet and stops Jason, only to have Mystique trick Jason to force Xavier to "kill all humans" instead. The X-Men stop this, but Magneto then leaves and traps Stryker with metal chains and leaves him to drown upon the rupture of a nearby dam.
In X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), Magneto frees Mystique from a mobile mutant prison, but abandons her after she is struck by a dart meant for him, containing a new "cure" for mutant powers derived from the mutant Leech, leaving her human and useless to him. Magneto sees this cure as an attack on mutant-kind as a whole, and raises an army of mutants, including a resurrected and corrupted Jean Grey, to stop the manufacturing of this cure. He fails to stop Jean, having been consumed by her own inner darkness, called the Phoenix, from killing his old friend Charles Xavier. Magneto then uproots the Golden Gate Bridge, taking the battle to the Worthington facility on Alcatraz Island, but ends up being depowered when Beast injects him with the serum. He later manages to move a metal chess piece slightly, hinting that his powers are not fully gone.
Two years after the events of The Wolverine (2013), Wolverine is approached by his old enemy Magneto (McKellen) as well as Professor X (Stewart) himself; Magneto warns him about "dark forces" that can bring about the end of mutants as an advert from Trask Industries plays on a television screen. Mystique's acts of assassinating Bolivar Trask in 1973 and being captured and experimented upon, alongside the events culminating with The Last Stand, eventually leads up to dark dystopian future where by 2023, most of the world's mutants have been exterminated by unstoppable super-Sentinels partially created from Mystique's DNA. Magneto and Charles Xavier devise a plan to send one of their own back through time through Kitty Pryde's secondary mutant power of chronoskimming, allowing her to project a person's consciousness back to their own past self and creating the possibility of changing the past into a more hopeful present and future. Since only Wolverine can survive being sent back half a century, Kitty sends his mind back to his 1973 self, before Raven could kill Trask and be captured. Back in 2023, Magneto protects them by fighting the Sentinels alongside other mutants, and is injured when impaled by debris from an explosion.
Revised Earth-10005 variant Escape and second chance
In 1973, a time-travelling Logan convinces Hank McCoy and the young Charles Xavier to break Lehnsherr out of his prison made of concrete and sand beneath The Pentagon as part of an effort to avert a dark future. They go to Paris to stop Raven from assassinating Bolivar Trask to keep her from being captured. Trask escapes, and Lehnsherr decides to kill Raven to protect their future, but only manages to injure her, leaving her blood on the streets for Trask Industries to obtain. He later confronts Raven at an airport and tries to convince her that "killing one man isn't enough", but Raven still persists, intending to kill Trask at a meeting outside the White House in Washington, D.C. Realizing that the future they were trying to prevent may still come to pass, Lehnsherr comes up with his own plan. Tracking down the location of the eight Sentinel robot prototypes (made out of a non-magnetic "space-age polymer"), he infuses them with iron to be able to control them, and then heads to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, uprooting the stadium with his magnetic powers and transporting it to the White House while triggering the Sentinels to start firing wildly and securing the surroundings for him.