Viggo Mortensen on awkward encounter with X-MEN director and reluctance on Wolverine casting.

Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast for MTV features a new chat with Lord of the Rings star Virgo Mortensen, who opened up about about his potential Wolverine casting meeting with 2000 X-MEN director Bryan Singer.

“The thing that bothered me at the time was just the commitment of endless movies of that same character over and over,” Mortensen told the MTV podcast as transcribed by IndieWire. “I was nervous about that. And also there were some things, I mean they straightened most of them out, but I did take Henry to the meeting I had with the director as my sort of good luck charm and guide. In the back of my mind I was thinking he could learn something too, because I did let Henry read the script and he goes ‘This is wrong. That’s not how it is.’”

He continued, “And [Henry] goes, ‘Yeah, but he doesn’t look like this.’ And all of a sudden the director is falling all over himself and then the rest of the meeting was him explaining in detail to Henry why he was taking certain liberties. We walked out of there, and Henry asks if he will change the things he told him about, and I say, ‘I don’t think so.’ I’m not going to do it anyway, because I’m not sure I want to be doing this for years, and then a couple of years later I’m doing three ‘Lord of the Rings,’ so who knows.”

That quote is sure to get a chuckle out of critics who complained about Singer’s plot and visual choices, including his previous stated decision to have the mutant team appear as a covert militaristic unit in uniformity.

Source: Happy Sad Confused, (transcribed quote via IndieWire)

Featured photo courtesy of New Line Cinema.