Evangeline Lilly reveals she rejected Hugh Jackman's pitch for her to star in an 'X-Men' movie

• Evangeline Lilly says Hugh Jackman asked her to star in an "X-Men" movie while making "Real Steel."
• "I was like, 'No. It doesn't interest me,'" she recalled on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast.

It seems not even the persuasive in-person pitch by Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, could get Evangeline Lilly excited to join an "X-Men" movie.

While on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, the star of "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" recalled the moment Jackman approached her while the two were making the 2011 movie "Real Steel."

"[He] 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 said (at the 25:50 mark) with a laugh. "'They knew I was working with you and were interested to know if it would ever interest you to do an 'X-Men' thing.'"

"I was like, 'No. It doesn't interest me. I'm not interested,'" she recalled telling Jackman. "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!"

"I always just had to do what felt right for me," said Lilly, who had just wrapped up doing six seasons of the hit TV show "Lost" at the time.

But even before the "X-Men" offer, Lilly was offered an even bigger superhero role.

She also revealed on the podcast that while she was doing "Lost," she met with Joss Whedon about playing Wonder Woman.

"I think my impression, coming away from it, was I had no desire and he could tell," Lilly said about the meeting with Whedon, admitting that she was "too young to be that polite" to act interested in playing the iconic DC Comics character that Gal Gadot would later go on to play on the big screen.

"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," she continued. "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."

In the case of her meeting with Whedon, who at the time was on the cusp of making one of Marvel's biggest hits, 2012's "The Avengers," looking back she believes the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator might have had some "offense taken" over her rejection of the role.

"I was okay with that. I was okay with burning bridges," Lilly said. "I was okay with not having everyone in Hollywood wanna work with me."

Years later, she was finally sucked into a comic-book movie. She's played Hope van Dyne, aka The Wasp, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2015's "Ant-Man."