Audiences would’ve had a very different “X-Men” experience had Hugh Jackman been fired from playing Wolverine.
The 50-year-old actor now holds the Guinness World Record for “longest career as a live-action Marvel superhero” for 17 years. But he almost lost the iconic superhero role before the film was released way back in 2000.
During a performance from his one man show – “The Man. The Music. The Show.” – Jackman walked down memory lane and recalled the time when he almost lost his role as Logan in the middle of filming the first X-Men movie.
“5 weeks into shooting and I was on the verge of getting fired,” the Oscar-nominated actor shared. “The head of the studio pulled me aside, sat me down at lunch, and said that they were worried that they weren’t seeing on camera what they’d seen in the audition. It’s like there’s a lampshade over the light.”
Even Bryan Singer thought the same. “And the very next day the director pulled me aside and told me exactly the same thing, even the whole ‘lampshade over the light’ thing, the same speech. So clearly they’d been talking and I was freaking out,” he remembered.
Jackman continued, “I’m thinking, oh, this is the talk you get before you get fired. And this was the biggest break of my career by a mile up to this point. And I went home to Deb, and was complaining to her.”
“So, she listened to me very patiently for about an hour, and finally she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, ‘Babe, I think you’ve gotta just trust yourself, you’re worrying way too much about what everybody else is thinking, just go back to the beginning, focus on the character, trust your instincts, you’ve got this’.”
Thankfully, the pep talk from wife Deborra-Lee Furness worked and he calmed down. We simply can’t imagine anyone else achieving Jackman’s unmatched cinematic superhero legacy.
Now that Jackman has hung up his claws for good after his swan song movie in “Logan”, Marvel Studios is looking to recast the fearsome Wolverine so that he can be included in the future Marvel Cinematic Universe. For some reason, Scott Eastwood keeps popping up as a potential favourite.
There’s even a fan art dedicated to him:
Who would make a good replacement for Hugh Jackman as Wolverine for the MCU?
