New ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Photo: Storm Looks Out on 1980s Cairo

Alexandra Shipp as Storm in ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ (Instagram)

Alexandra Shipp is acting up a storm in the X-Men role formerly played by Halle Berry. On Tuesday, director Bryan Singer posted a very cool Instagram shot of Shipp on the set of X-Men: Apocalypse, playing the younger ‘80s version of weather-wielding mutant Storm. The photo shows the actress on a fake rock against a green screen — but thanks to the magic of SIMULCAM technology (invented for Avatar), the monitor shows Shipp staring at a CG-created Egyptian landscape. “#Storm watches over #1983 #Cairo via the magic of real time,” Singer tweeted. (As fans of the comic know, the city of Cairo holds special significance for Storm.)

Related: See all the behind-the-scenes photos from ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’

Storm’s new look is a big departure from Halle Berry’s Storm costume, below, in the previous X-Men films. While Berry’s character was largely monochromatic, wearing mostly black leather, Shipp’s superhero is outfitted in flashy, glittering purple. (Take a look at the full costume at EW.) And while Berry wore Storm’s white hair in several different styles, she never tried anything as punk-rock as the shaved mohawk Shipp is sporting. (Hey, it’s the ‘80s!)

Halle Berry as Storm in ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ (Everett Collection)

X-Men: Apocalypse, in which the superhero team must battle the god-like mutant Apocalypse (played by Oscar Isaac), introduces younger versions of the original X-Men movie characters, including Jean Grey, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, and Storm. They’ll be fighting alongside X-Men: First Class characters like Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto — although some of those characters’ stories will conclude with this film. In an interview with Yahoo Movies, Singer teased that these younger mutants would be “very different characters” than the versions we know from X-Men, X2, and X-Men: The Last Stand.

Alexandra Shipp (Getty Images)

“They are at times in their lives where they are probably at the most opposite of what they were to become,” said the director, “and that’s a kind of a thrill for me, to be able to go back and take characters that I had crafted so many years ago, and then flip them completely on their side and show how they evolved and how they began.”

X-Men: Apocalypse opens in theaters on May 27, 2016.

Watch Oscar Isaac talk about his villain Apocalypse: