Before Millie Bobby Brown became one of Netflix’s defining genre faces with “Stranger Things,” she almost entered superhero cinema through a very different door. Brown recently recalled screen-testing opposite Hugh Jackman for James Mangold’s “Logan,” the 2017 Wolverine film that ultimately introduced Dafne Keen as Laura/X-23.
Brown shared the story during Entertainment Weekly’s’s video series “Lie vs. Lie,” where she and “Enola Holmes 3” co-star Louis Partridge traded audition stories and tried to guess which ones were true. She said she was still a kid when she tested with Jackman.
“I screentested with Hugh Jackman when I was like, 11 or 12,” Brown told Partridge, before confirming that it was for “the Wolverine movies.”
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Asked how she felt after leaving the room, Brown didn’t try to soften the memory.
“Broken,” Brown said. “I felt like I probably didn’t get it, because I think there was someone else that was better.”
Partridge guessed the real movie from the timeline, noting that Brown would have been around the right age for the X-23 role in “Logan.” Brown then admitted the story was true and that she had only tried to disguise the title to make the game harder.
“It’s true,” Brown said. “And it was for ‘Logan.’ I just thought to throw you off with the Wolverine movies.”
The part eventually went to Keen, whose feral, bruising performance as Laura became one of the major reasons “Logan” played like a true endpoint for Jackman’s Wolverine rather than just another franchise installment. Keen later reprised the role in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” bringing the character into the broader Marvel machine years after Mangold’s film seemed to give that corner of the “X-Men” universe a hard, elegiac stop.
Brown, meanwhile, never made the leap into Marvel, at least not yet. Instead, she became a different kind of superpowered child with a number for a name, playing Eleven across all five seasons of “Stranger Things.” It is an amusing bit of alternate-history casting, if only because the two roles sit in the same general pop-cultural orbit: young girls turned into weapons, hunted by adults, and forced to define themselves outside the systems that made them.
“Enola Holmes 3” is now streaming on Netflix.
