20 Actors You Didn't Know Almost Played X-Men

9. Angel Bassett And Jada Pinkett-Smith Both Turned Down Storm

Before Halle Berry came on board and took every watching X-Men fan on a whistle-stop tour around the entire world thanks to her bad case of Wandering Franchise Accent Syndrome, it seems that two other actresses had to turn the role down in order for her to take it.

Jada Pinkett-Smith, who will eventually get to play a part in a comic book screen event when she appears as Fish Mooney in the upcoming Gotham TV show, was considered for the role - allegedly after the producers considered moving for Janet Jackson, but turned it down to make way for Berry, who had impressed Bryan Singer in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.

Even before the wife of Will Smith was considered, back at the time that Glenn Danzig was probably thinking about ways to make Wolverine not seem gay, Angela Bassett - who famously played Tina Turner in 1993 biopic What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) and less famously played opposite Eddie Murphy in Vampire In Brooklyn, was attached to the role.

Bassett was actually attached to play Storm in the abandoned 1995 film that never was but pre-production took so long that she was too busy filing Supernova to continue and an early rewrite of the script lessened Storm's role in a way the actress thought a step backwards.