Hugh Jackman is convinced destiny played a big hand in his X-Men casting

Hugh Jackman still can’t believe the good fortune that helped land him his long-running role as X-Men mutant Wolverine, because there were so many things stacked against him getting the part.
Many actors would have given up on the role due to scheduling issues and subsequently losing out to someone else, but Hugh kept dreaming and eventually the X-Men project fell into his lap.
During a recent SAG Conversations panel, the actor, who has now hung up his claws as Wolverine, reflected on his fateful big film break.
“I was in London doing Oklahoma on the West End and it was a worldwide casting call for Wolverine,” he recalled. “I was sent three pages and my wife read the lines with me: ‘…claws come out of his hand’, and she said, ‘Hugh, you can’t be doing this. You just did the Royal Shakespeare with (top theatre director) Trevor Nunn. You can’t be having claws coming out of your hands!’
“But I went to the audition in between the matinee and the evening show. I literally whipped off the leather chaps and ran over to Soho to do this audition. I was playing Curly (in Oklahoma), so I had a perm in my hair, so I had a baseball cap on. The casting agent asked me to take it off and I did and she said, ‘Yeah, you can put that back on’. I got a call back with instructions to lose the perm and the Southern cowboy accent.
“For my audition in L.A. they wanted me to take time off from Oklahoma to do it and I said, ‘No, I can’t just leave my cast members and say I’m auditioning for a movie’. So, at first they were going to Concorde me over and I’m like, ‘I’m in, this is awesome’. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘If I don’t get the part, whatever, I’m flying the Concorde!’ Then the director went with Dougray Scott and I didn’t get to fly the Concorde.”
But just like a boomerang from his native Australia, the part came back to him six months later.
“Dougray is the coolest guy. He couldn’t do Wolverine because he was shooting Mission Impossible 2,” Jackman said. “When we started X-Men, I had already been hired to be the host of this 20th Century Fox studio thing in Australia, where they were shooting Mission Impossible 2 and Dougray was there.
“I went up to him afterwards and said, ‘Dude, I feel really awkward about this’, and he said, ‘Stop, it’s the greatest part. You’re going to absolutely kick a**. Go crush it’. That’s a class act.”