Did You Know Hugh Jackman Was Offered James Bond Way Before Daniel Craig?

People protested a blonde James Bond when Daniel Craig was cast, but imagine their reaction had the producers chosen an Australian - especially after the franchise’s troubled history with Aussies. Hugh Jackman in a recent interview to Variety said that he was considered for the part after Pierce Brosnan’s tenure, but felt the scripts were too ‘unbelievable’.

“I was about to do X-Men 2 and a call came from my agent asking if I’d be interested in Bond,” Jackman said. “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.”

Which is exactly the route they took with the Craig series - but Jackman was told that he would not have a say in the series’ stories. He simply wasn’t a big enough star back then, despite having landed the role of a lifetime with Wolverine. In fact, he was concerned about making time for passion projects with two large franchises under his bag.

He said he was “worried that between Bond and X-Men, (he’d) never have time to do different things.”

Jackman doesn’t have any regrets, though. “I always tried to do different things,” he said. “But there was a time between X-Men 3 and the first Wolverine movie when I could see the roles getting smaller. People wanted me to play that kind of hero part exclusively. It felt a little bit claustrophobic.”

Craig went on to star in four Bond films, with a fifth and final movie expected in 2019. Jackman won critical and commercial acclaim with his final outing as Logan . He will next be seen in The Greatest Showman, expected to arrive in time for awards season this year.