Erik Lehnsherr

Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto, a Holocaust survivor who controls magnetism, believes coexistence is a fantasy and prepares for war. Magneto abducts her to power a machine that converts humans into mutants, intending to force acceptance by making the world's leaders into the thing they fear. The film establishes the shape of everything that follows: Xavier and Magneto as friends who agree entirely about the danger and completely about nothing else, and Wolverine as the outsider who has no memory of his own past and therefore no stake in either argument until he chooses one.

Magneto turns the machine's targeting around to kill every human instead, and is stopped.

The government weaponises it into darts, and Magneto declares war.

Young Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik (Michael Fassbender) meet, recruit the first team, and split over the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sebastian Shaw — the Nazi scientist who murdered Erik's mother in front of him to force his power to manifest — is running the Cuban Missile Crisis from both sides, intending to trigger a nuclear war that leaves mutants inheriting the Earth. Charles and Erik recruit the first team to stop him, and do.

In 1973 he has to reunite a Charles who has given up — drugging away his telepathy to be able to walk — with a Magneto imprisoned under the Pentagon for the Kennedy assassination.

Hiding in Poland with a wife and a daughter until they are killed in front of him, which is what makes him available to Apocalypse.