Evangeline Lilly returns as Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp, in Marvel Studios' Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the Lost alum has now touched on some intriguing brushes with (potential) comic book movie roles before she signed on to play the pint-sized hero.
While being interviewed for the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Lilly revealed that Hugh Jackman approached her about joining the X-Men franchise when they worked together on robot boxing movie Real Steel.
"[He] was like, ‘Hey, so, the X-Men guys are asking me if I would approach you because they know that you won’t talk to anybody," she explained. "They knew I was working with you and were interested to know if it would ever interest you to do an X-Men thing."
Lilly was not interested, and says she felt "like such a dick" for declining the offer to Wolverine himself. She didn't feel quite a bad about turning down Joss Whedon's invitation to play Wonder Woman, however.
Noting that there may have been "slight offence taken," Lilly added: “I was okay with that. I was okay with burning bridges. I was okay with not having everyone in Hollywood wanna work with me…I just always had to do what felt right for me,. And honestly I wasn’t into superhero movies and that’s the main reason why, in both of these instances, I just kind of felt like I don’t know what I get out of this.”
Lilly's attitude to superhero films obviously changed over the years, but was the Wasp the right role to pick? The character made an impact in the first Ant-Man movie, but the feeling is that she's been somewhat sidelined since, and it must be said that Quantumania really struggles to utilize Hope in a memorable way outside of maybe one climactic sequence.
Which X-Men character do you think the studio had in mind for Lilly? Do you feel she'd have been a good choice to play Wonder Woman? Drop us a comment down below.
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