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It’s hard to imagine anyone but Hugh Jackman in the part of Wolverine in the X-Men franchise.
The Australian actor, 55, has played the mutant superhero in nine movies, starting with X-Men in 2000, and is now set to reprise the role in Deadpool & Wolverine alongside Ryan Reynolds.
However, the actor Dougray Scott was originally lined up to star as Wolverine in the first movie, but eventually had to pull out of the project due to scheduling conflicts, as he was already cast in Mission: Impossible 2.
The producers then had to recast the role at the last minute, and ended up calling upon Jackman.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the Greatest Showman star recalled how he was asked to read lines in director Bryan Singer’s trailer, while the seemingly unimpressed screenwriter Tom DeSanto was sitting in the corner.
“He’s just going, ‘Quiet… Quieter… Quieter,’” Jackman said. “By the end, I couldn’t even hear myself,” Jackman says of DeSanto. “I could tell he was like, ‘Why on my lunch hour am I auditioning some guy for a part that I’ve already cast?’ He was p**sed off.”
Jackson was left feeling deflated after the experience and didn’t feel optimistic about his chances of landing the part.
However Kevin Feige, now the CEO of Marvel Studios, was working as a producer’s assistant on the movie, and offered to take him out for dinner along with the screenwriter.
“I said, ‘Kevin, we all know I’m not getting the part. You don’t have to do dinner,’” Jackman said. “But no, he sat in there and had a steak dinner with me and then drove me to the airport. I’ll never forget it. That was the nicest thing. I thought, ‘I’ll never see him again.’”
Jackman would, of course, go on to get the part, despite some of the filmmakers apparently being concerned that he was “too tall”, according to Feige (in the original X-Men comic books, Wolverine is described as being short).
Disney, which owns Marvel Studios, would go on to purchase Fox, including the studio’s rights to the X-Men characters, in 2019.
Feige serves as a producer on Deadpool & Wolverine, which is directed by Shaun Levy and will arrive in UK cinemas on 25 July.
