It’s a given that we all have regrets, but what if one of them was not suiting up as a prominent member of the X-Men? During an interview with The New York Times, actress Rachael Leigh Cook admitted that she regrets turning down the opportunity to play Rogue in 2000’s X-Men.
During her time with NYT, Cook confessed that she turned down the role because she didn’t want to work with green screen technology. She now considers her decision a “huge misstep” and has remorse about not getting in on the ground floor of the superhero movie boom when things started popping off. “As soon as I saw the posters for it, I knew that I’d made a mistake.”
Thinking back on her career at the time, Cook conceded, “I really thought what everyone told me was correct when they said, ‘What we need to do now is make sure you’re taken seriously,’ I definitely did things for the wrong reasons.”
Ultimately, the role of Rogue for 2000’s X-Men went to Anna Paquin, who went on to play the power-siphoning mutant for a total of four movies.
Cook, who doesn’t spend too much time in front of the camera these days, is about to appear in He’s All That, a reimagining of 1999’s She’s All That. Cook played the lead character, Laney Boggs, in She’s All That. The original film focused on a high school jock who makes a bet that he can turn an unattractive girl into the school’s prom queen. In the new film, Cook plays Anna Sawyer, mother to the film’s main character, Padgett Sawyer (Addison Rae). In the new film, Padgett sets out to give a nebbish classmate the ultimate high school makeover.
What do you think about Cook’s decision to pass on the role of Rogue for X-Men? Do you think she would have done a better job with the part than Paquin? Would playing Rogue have launched Cook into superstardom? Let us know if you’re a Paquin stan in the comments section below.