Before ‘Stranger Things,’ Millie Bobby Brown Could’ve Been a Marvel Mutant

Playing “what if?” with Hollywood projects may be a bit pointless, but it’s almost always amusing. What if Will Smith had agreed to star in The Matrix or Inception? What if Superman‘s Nicholas Hoult had been cast as Batman rather than Robert Pattinson? Or Daredevil‘s Charlie Cox as the young Han Solo?

Another star on this roster of trivia is Millie Bobby Brown, who shot to fame as a tween back in 2016 when Stranger Things premiered on Netflix. She played Eleven for six seasons across a decade and has also starred in other Netflix projects, including the Enola Holmes movies. But very early in her career, she saw a role that she very dearly wanted to play slip through her fingers.

In a new Entertainment Weekly piece, Brown said that she “screentested with Hugh Jackman when I was like 11 or 12.”

She then specified that it was for Logan, James Mangold’s 2017 movie about the aging X-Men member Wolverine. Brown was up for Laura, aka X-23, the young mutant who teams up with Jackman’s Logan.

The part ended up going to Dafne Keen, who recently brought the character back in Deadpool & Wolverine.

When she didn’t get cast, she felt “broken,” Brown recalled. “I felt like I probably didn’t get it, because I think there was someone else that was better.”

Brown actually spoke about her Logan near-miss to Variety years ago, when she was just 13—soon after Logan actually hit theaters. Her impressions were a bit more positive back then; Variety wrote that she considered it her “best audition” at the time.

“I was like, ‘It’s going to be amazing, I’m going to really prepare,’ and I sat in my room reading the lines,” Brown said in 2017. “Honestly, for me, I felt so—I felt an actor, in the audition room, hitting Hugh Jackman, and James Mangold sitting right in front of me.”

The then-teenager, who praised Keen’s performance, also recalled her worst audition to date, which was for a Barbie commercial. Fortunately, she found great success with Stranger Things, but can you imagine her playing X-23?

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