Its funny, considering how well known Hugh Jackman has become for playing Wolverine in the X-Men franchise, it was a role that he very nearly missed out on. Originally, Dougray Scott was offered the part, but had to drop out of the production due to a scheduling conflict he had been filming Mission: Impossible III at the time, which ran over schedule. Despite the fact that when the first X-Men film was in pre-production, Jackman was only known outside of Australia for playing the role of Curly in Oklahoma on the West End, the X-Men team decided to take another look at his tape. And the rest, as they say, is history. X-Men launched Hugh Jackmans career into the stratosphere, where it remains to this very day.
9. Aaron Paul As Jesse Pinkman - Breaking Bad
At this point in Aaron Paul's career, the only thing we'd ever seen him in was a particularly enthralling episode of The Price is Right that one time when we were home sick from school, where he came within a few hundred dollars of winning the Showcase Showdown. But although he would eventually go on to make a name for himself with a supporting role on HBO's Big Love, he was still largely unknown to the general public. Then he comes in to read for the part of Jesse Pinkman on Breaking Bad, and you can tell that it's all about to change for him. He fumbles over his lines a few times, but it doesn't even matter -- the magnetism and dysfunctional charisma of Jesse is all there. We wish that there was footage from his first actual screen test, so that we could have gotten a longer look at the early origins of one of television's best characters in recent memory.