Evangeline Lilly, former superhero snob, turned down X-Men and Wonder Woman before the MCU

Evangeline Lilly is now deeply entrenched in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there was a time where you literally couldn’t pay her to be in a superhero movie. Before conceding to be the MCU’s Wasp, she shrugged off Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman and an opportunity to join Hugh Jackman in the X-Men franchise, she confesses on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

Lilly, who had previously revealed that she took a meeting for Wonder Woman, now admits she “was too young to be that polite” to even fake an interest in the film. “I think my impression, coming away from it, was I had no desire and [Whedon] could tell,” she says. “It didn’t appeal and there was nothing about the meeting that like, jazzed me or made me think like, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta do this.’ … Nothing clicked. Nothing felt good. I think that I at that time, and still I think to this day, I am way too authentic for my own good. I mean, it’s not good. If I am not impressed, you’ll know. And maybe you shouldn’t know sometimes.”

Whedon might have taken a bit of “offense” to her lack of interest, but she “was okay with that.”

“I was okay with burning bridges. I was okay with not having everyone in Hollywood wanna work with me,” says the actor, whose credits include showing up for an anti-vaccine protest in Washington, D.C.

Wonder Woman isn’t the only hero Lilly passed up on, though. “When we were were working on Real Steel, Hugh Jackman 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, and won’t do anything and you’re not reading scripts and no one can reach you,’” she reveals. “‘So, they knew I was working with you and were interested to know if it would ever interest you to maybe do an X-Men thing.”

“And I was like, ‘No. It doesn’t interest me. I’m not interested,’” Lilly says. “I was like, ‘I feel like such a dick because I’m talking to an X-Men! …The X-Men! And I’m telling him, ‘No that doesn’t appeal.’ Like, what?! I felt so rude!”

The Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania star asserts that she “always had to do what felt right for me,” admitting that not only did she not want to act in a superhero film, she didn’t even want to watch one. “I often was very critical of them. Like, I was known to mock them and treat them as lower forms of entertainment until Marvel came around. And when they approached, I had the same reaction. You know, I’m equal, I’m fair in my negativity!”

However, her manager convinced her to check out some of the MCU entries, “And when I did, I was like, ‘Oh, they’re doing something very different and very cool,’” she says.

Edgar Wright’s departure from the first film initially vindicated her disapproval of Marvel (“I was like, ‘See? This is why you say no to the big franchises.’”) But the next version of the script convinced her to stick with it, and she ultimately came around to the MCU’s big-scale style of storytelling. And the rest, as they say, is history.