Would Hugh Jackman have made a good 007…?
In an interview with Variety promoting his latest film, The Greatest Showman on Earth, the actor was naturally asked about Logan, the swan song for his character Wolverine (aka Logan). Jackman has reprised the role in eight movies over the course of seventeen years.
“I wish I’d started playing him like that 17 years ago,” Jackman says. “So there’s some sense of missed opportunity, but when I saw ‘Logan,’ I sat there and I did have tears in my eyes. The main feeling I had was: “There, that’s the character. I feel like I’ve done it now.” And I was calm and at peace, but I’m going to miss that guy.”
But it turns out that he was, mid the first trilogy of X-Men movies in fact, approached by the producers of James Bond to play the iconic agent. At the time, Bond was being played by Pierce Brosnan and the role would eventually go, as we all know, to Daniel Craig.
Jackman explains: “I was about to do ‘X-Men 2’ and a call came from my agent asking if I’d be interested in Bond.
“I just felt at the time that the scripts had become so unbelievable and crazy, and I felt like they needed to become grittier and real. And the response was: ‘Oh, you don’t get a say. You just have to sign on.’ I was also worried that between Bond and ‘X-Men,’ I’d never have time to do different things.”
To avoid getting hemmed into franchises and crowd pleasers, Jackman went to make the likes of The Boy From Oz, Prisoners and Les Misérables, for which he got awards and big nominations so he made the right call. Plus, leaving Wolverine would've meant the films couldn't have culminated into the masterpiece that is the movie Logan.