Bryan Singer Didn’t Want Comics on the ‘X-Men’ Set

If you look back on the original X-Men movie now, it does seem fairly dated. And the thing is now almost 25 years old, so that’s not totally shocking. At the time, it looked cutting-edge and almost daring in its willingness to throw a Marvel comic up on the screen. Compared with modern superhero movies now, though, it is distinctly lacking in color, and in comics-accurate costumes and details. The X-Men don’t wear anything approximating their comic-book uniforms; instead, they’re draped in matching black leather, a look they continued through the next two sequels.

Which makes sense when you read stories like the one Hugh Jackman recently told in The New York Times. Promoting his return to playing X-Men hero Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine, Jackman talked about the first time he met Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, whose first gig in Hollywood was working as a producer on that original X-Men film.

As Jackman tells it, Feige was a “really good guy” who took him out for a meal and drove him to the airport after his screen test, even though at the time, the whole thing was essentially a formality because director Bryan Singer had already picked his Wolverine: Dougray Scott. There was no way Jackman was going to get this part.

But then Scott had to drop out of the film because production on Mission: Impossible II ran long, and Jackman became his last-minute replacement. At that point, Jackman said, he and Feige bonded “big time,” in part because Feige would bring him Wolverine comics to read — which was actually a big no-no on the X-Men set. Singer didn’t want anyone reading Marvel comics.

READ MORE: What One Man Learned Reading Every Marvel Comic Ever Made

“[Feige] was slipping me some comic books under the radar because the director [Bryan Singer] didn’t want them on set,” Jackman recalled.

Why would a director of a huge comic-book movie not want his actors reading comic books to get into character? “I think he was worried about people reading the comic, that people would think they were two-dimensional,” Jackman speculated.

In the same interview, Jackman’s Deadpool & Wolverine co-star, Ryan Reynolds, called that decision “curious.”

So if you’ve ever wondered why it took 25 years to get Hugh Jackman in a yellow and blue Wolverine costume, that’s why! Deadpool & Wolverine premieres in theaters on July 26.