It's a well-known piece of Marvel trivia that Dougray Scott was originally cast as Wolverine in 2000's X-Men. However, a scheduling conflict meant he had to commit to Mission: Impossible 2 (at Tom Cruise's behest), leaving the door open to Hugh Jackman being picked to play Logan at the last minute.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, the actor looked back at reading lines for director Bryan Singer and the movie's unimpressed screenwriter, Tom DeSanto.
"He's just going, 'Quiet... Quieter... Quieter.' 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 pissed off."
As Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige remembers it, behind the scenes, there was "a scramble to get our Wolverine." He adds, "Lauren [Shuler Donner] was very excited about this Australian guy, who had been rejected initially. In my memory, one of the main reasons was that he was too tall. Wolverine in the comics is called 'Lil' Fireplugs' sometimes. He's a short guy. But they were desperate."
Jackman's height has been a sticking point for fans for well over two decades. Regardless, Jackman left his audition feeling deflated and Feige was tasked with driving him back to the Toronto airport and offered to take the actor out for something to eat ("I didn't want to just send him out into the cold!" Feige remembers).
"I said, 'Kevin, we all know I'm not getting the part. You don't have to do dinner,'" Jackman recalls. "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."
The rest, as they say, is history. Jackman got the role and, after bidding farewell to the character in 2017's Logan, he'll now make his MCU debut in Deadpool & Wolverine.
However, bringing both characters into the fold was no easy task for Feige. "I don't want to get into corporate acquisition legal laws or whatever. I don't understand them, but there's a lot of 'em," Feige explains. "It took a long time between whenever [the acquisition] was announced to it all getting done, so [the characters] weren't really in our sandbox for a very long time after that first announcement happened."
"The notion that, all these years later, we're in a world where [Jackman] is Wolverine, and Deadpool and all of those X-Men characters are together under the same roof, is a pretty amazing quarter-of-a-century experience," he adds.
As for what the future holds in store for the X-Men, Feige declined to comment on Marvel Studios' planned reboot, but says, "July 26 is really when it all starts, when Deadpool & Wolverine comes out..."