Rachael Leigh Cook explains why she turned down being Rogue in X-Men

Way back in 1999, Rachael Leigh Cook starred in She’s All That, a modern retelling of Pygmalion where a shallow high schooler (Freddie Prinze Jr.) makes a bet that he can’t turn a shy, unpopular girl (Cook) into a Prom Queen in six weeks. The movie…hasn’t aged super well, but it’s fondly remembered enough that it got a Netflix update that came out this past weekend, He’s All That, which Cook also starred in.

But would Cook have revisited this series if her career had taken off in a bigger way? In a New York Times profile, the actor remembers turning down the role of Rogue in 2001’s X-Men movie — a role that went to her She’s All That costar Anna Paquin — because she wanted to “avoid acting on a green screen.” But “as soon as I saw the posters for it, I knew that I’d made a mistake.”

"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."

Cook has had plenty of success since She’s All That and is still working regularly, but being in X-Men might have helped her career; I mean, Paquin was the lead actor on True Blood for seven seasons, and that show was huge. (They’re remaking that, too, obviously.)

Could Rachael Leigh Cook play Rogue in Disney’s new X-Men movies?

That first X-Men movie introduced Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and started the superhero movie revolution that is now at its screaming, unstoppable zenith. But who could have known at the time that superheroes would get so big? Wanting to avoid a green screen might have seemed like a good justification for saying “no” at the time.

We haven’t had a new X-Men movie in a minute, although now that Disney has purchased 20th Century Fox, it’s only a matter of time before we’re reintroduced to the mutants. At that point, we can assume that someone new will play Rogue. And who knows? Depending on when in the X-Men timeline the new movies/TV shows pick up, maybe Cook can return to the role that got away.

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h/t The A.V. Club