I Flew 25 Hours To The X-Men Mansion And All I Got Was This Overwhelming Sense Of Belonging

The night before I visited the X-Men mansion, I didn’t sleep. I watched in dread as 2.25am turned into 4.01am and then suddenly my alarm went off at six. “You have three interviews in the morning,” I kept thinking to myself as panic rippled through my stomach for the 200th time, while I stared at the hotel ceiling. “You need to get it together. You’ve been sent to Canada.”

You can probably guess that this thought did not calm me down.

I was invited to join a crew of international reporters to visit Parkwood Estate in Ontario, one of the filming locations for Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters in the X-Men films. The site was first used in the 2000 film X-Men (they called it the ‘X-Mansion’ then) but is also featured in the recent prequel trilogy X-Men: First Class, Days of Future Past and Apocalypse. It was a big and exciting task — how often do you get the chance to interact with a beloved piece of pop culture in such a tangible and weird way? But sometimes feeling excited and feeling nervous are inseparable sensations of carbonated bubbles in your guts, and my anticipation turned into a sweaty fear that I would absolutelty cook this opportunity.

It felt like an international trick. “I hope they don’t harvest my organs!” I joked with my workmates. “Oh no, what if they harvest my organs?” I thought on the plane ride over.

I thought I was going to Toronto (I saw ‘Toronto Airport’ in the email and apparently just blacked out the rest of the information, something that I still find deeply concerning) but I was actually going was Oshawa, a much smaller city that is 60 kilometres from Toronto. In my defence, the other reporters seemed equally flummoxed that they were not in Toronto, as exhibited in the repeated conversation topic of the trip: ‘How do we get to Toronto?’.

Oshawa was once well-known for its successful automotive industry, Parkwood Estate was actually originally owned by the founder of General Motors Canada in the early 1900s. A shuttle bus driver told me that many people in the city still worked for Oshawa’s General Motors plant, a plant that is under constant threat of closure, which caused a lot of strain. He explained that the city was great, as long as “everyone was working”.

It seemed like a pretty friendly place. When I was getting breakfast on my second morning, I saw a man who was familiar with the café owner walk in and announce with triumph that he was moving back to Oshawa after a brief stint in Toronto. “I was mugged twice!” the man said, shaking his head. The café owner did not seem surprised. The people in Oshawa were very polite – even when I ordered a poutine that was deemed “too plain” — and often told me to have a good one, eh.

But I was not here for poutine. I was here for the mutants.

My group was set to visit the mansion at seven in the morning and spend the day exploring the estate, taking part in interactive activities and interviewing Jubilee (Lana Condor), Magneto’s wife, Magda (Carolina Bartczak) and the head of the make-up department, Rita Ciccozzi. We received packets the night before that contained an enrolment letter, an Apocalypse t-shirt (in children’s large) and a certificate signed by Professor X congratulating us on our top marks at the school we hadn’t seen yet. I already felt a strong sense of acceptance. This was going to be the best first day of school ever.

Being the only reporter from Australia, I was pretty nervous about what the other media would be like. On the first morning I met a Mexican reporter who also got in late the night before and missed the introduction cocktail party at the mansion (he got the hotel wrong; I was coming from the ass-end of the world). We sat together at breakfast like two kids who had missed Year 7 orientation, joking that we were cool for not sitting with the group, while contemplating that we’d already made a huge social blunder that was impossible to recover from. The first day of school is just as scary when you’re 27 as when you’re 12 — that fear does not go away pals.

About ten of us piled into the shuttle bus to the mansion, reporters from the United States, Poland, Spain, Germany, Britain, Wales and a far-off land called ‘Toronto’ that now seemed a millennia away. On the bus my new best friend kept referring to the mansion as the “special school” by mistake and we laughed a lot about this, partly at the ridiculousness of the situation and mostly because laughing is fun. All of a sudden I didn’t feel like such an outsider. It helped that were sitting at the back of the bus, which will always give you the temporary illusion of being much cooler and carefree than you actually are.

The estate was massive and pretty, with huge green lawns that were dotted with old trees and a ‘XAVIER’S SCHOOL’ sign hanging over the door. According to Wikipedia, Parkwood Estate was also used in Billy Madison and a 2005 TV movie called Donald Trump Unauthorised, but I didn’t see any commemorative plaques to confirm this fact. Inside the mansion was lavishly decorated in red velvet hangings, oil portraits and furniture that was so old and expensive that it was roped off in case we got any fancy ideas that our butts deserved to sit on chairs that luxurious.

It seemed exactly like the kind of place a young mutant would grow up, and later use as place to house other mutants and preach his idealistic and privileged views.

In the films, the mansion is meant to be a place where mutants find community, learn how to control their powers, and fight about whether the school represents a mutant utopia free of prejudice, or a hiding hole which encourages mutants to be passive targets. It’s where Jennifer Lawrence has solemn conversations with her male co-stars while walking down wood-panelled corridors, and is the backdrop of various handsome mutants staring longingly at each other. A lot of handsome people have been to Parkwood Estate.

A Fox representative took us on a tour of the dorm rooms, including Professor X’s office, Jean and Jubilee’s room (which included posters of Duran Duran, Madonna and the character’s actual pastel-hued costumes draped on the bed), Nightcrawler’s room (including the trunk he falls out of in Apocalypse) and Cyclops and Quicksilver’s room. We were allowed to touch some props, but expressly forbidden to touch others, so no-one touched anything just in case. Everyone wanted to take photos with Quicksilver’s costume, because he is the coolest character in these films and no one bothers to pretend otherwise.

In the mansion, there was a room called ‘Cyclops Bathroom Disaster’ which was recreation of a scene in Apocalypse when Cyclops destroys his high school bathroom with his laser vision. The bathroom was full of rubble and the enthusiastic application of dry ice. “Mmm, marijuana!” said one of the Polish reporters, and people laughed.

From that moment on, the Polish guy became ‘the whacky one’. It was important to fix your identifier early, and I wondered if my choice to wear a Seinfeld t-shirt that day had branded me a cool kid or someone who was deeply trying to stress what total pop culture expert I was.

The interactive activities were the best part of the day. We were told that we could practice archery “just like Jean Grey” but first we had to sign a waiver that had the words ‘DEATH’ and ‘DANGER’ in bold caps every few paragraphs. A British reporter and I agreed that if we were going to die today, this would be a pretty exciting way to go, and would make the surviving reporters’ stories infinitely more interesting. “I want to shoot some animals!” The Polish reporter joked. Everyone laughed. What a wacky guy.

It was a long day and we were scheduled to be interviewing X-Men stars all morning. “She said I looked like Nicholas Hoult!” the English reporter said after interviewing the head of the make-up department. “Did she say that after she realised that you were English?” I said. “… yes,” he said.

I was on the verge of losing my friends. I needed to be careful. We were facing these uncertain conditions together, and throughout shared vulnerability in an unfamiliar land, deeply felt each other’s defeats. It could have been any of us. We were all mutant brothers now.

After about five hours, a Fox person told everyone that the ‘Cerebro Myndplay VR Experience’ was ready. In the films, Professor Xavier uses Cerebro to amplify his brainwaves to locate mutants and humans and to read their minds, which makes it a dangerous object in the hands of less honourable brains. In the recreation, it was a game that involved you putting on multiple headsets, sitting still on Professor Xavier’s wheelchair and “focusing” on a screen, which made it a game that I have unwittingly been training for my entire life.

I somehow got 100 points, which meant nothing and everything, but was a big enough deal that a reporter from New York congratulated me on it later. He also said “Still awake?*” every time I passed him in the corridor, which was three times. I suddenly realised that “still awake” had become my identifier. I watched as the Polish reporter danced for the camera.

As suddenly as it started, my trip to mutantville was over and I had to pack up my stuff and face the flight home; 50 hours of flight all up in five days, a fact that I will brag about for the rest of my life. It was probably the congealed curds of my first poutine oozing over the pleasure receptors in my brain, but the whole thing had made me strangely emotional.

The event may have just been a way to promote a DVD and show off some movie costumes, but I couldn’t get past the parallels between our experience and that of the X-Men characters who were people who felt like they didn’t really belong and would be found out at any moment, discovering a place where they were accepted and could bond over shared whatever. When you’re far from home in an unfamiliar place, it’s very easy to make these sort of self-indulgent comparisons without seeming dramatic.

In the end, I didn’t need to be so nervous about my potential incompetency and tendency to walk about from social interactions with the strong sensation that I had cooked it. On the way to the airport home, Celine Dion (yes, really) played in the car and I felt an overwhelming sense of jet lag mixed with gratitude. Then it hit me.

They had planned it this way, hadn’t they? This sense of belonging and community and shared mutant-ness is exactly what they wanted me to feel! Goddamn, I was such a sucker. Well, at least one thing is for certain: they’re going to have to pry that school certificate out of my cold dead hands.

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In preparation for Mutant Day on the September 28, X-Men fans can now enrol for the school for the Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, and digitally immerse themselves in the X-Men experience. Find out more about #MutantDay on September 28 by signing up for Xavier’s School For The Gifted here.

Buy X-Men Apocalypse Now on Digital. Available on 3D, Blu-ray and DVD September 28.