“I went on tape”: the iconic superhero Nick Offerman almost played
Nick Offerman has had two major roles this year, and it’s fair to say they are quite different. Firstly, he was a talking fish in The Pout-Pout Fish, a kids’ animation that didn’t do much business in the US and hasn’t come out here yet.
Then there was his role in the cult hit Prime Video show Margo’s Got Money Troubles, in which he plays Margo’s dad, who happens to be a former professional wrestler and a recovering drug addict, which is fairly far removed from being a cartoon aquatic creature.
But then these days it’s not that much of a surprise to see Offerman doing wildly different stuff; it certainly would have been back at the tail end of the 2000s when he was everyone’s favourite grumpy moustachioed office worker in the very bingeable comedy Parks and Recreation, but since then he has shown there aren’t many different genres he can’t turn his hand to.
There was his role alongside his real-life wife, Megan Mullally, in The Umbrella Academy, for one, where he played a bearded, bespectacled, softly-spoken community college professor called Dr Gene Thibedeau. Then there was his turn 20 years ago in Sin City, Robert Rodriguez’s comic book noir in which he played a low-rent criminal for hire called Burt Shlubb, complete with dyed blonde hair and nose ring.
Not forgetting his magnificent, Emmy award-winning performance in The Last of Us as one half of a gay couple living in the suburbs trying to make it through a zombie pandemic without getting munched to death. So yeah, it’s fair to say Offerman is much more than just a keyboard-destroying curmudgeon with tidy facial hair.
But could he play a proper superhero? Almost, it would seem. Because way back in the day, the year 2000 in fact, Offerman had a stab at being cast in one of the earliest Marvel movies, a film that launched a franchise long before the days of the MCU and the Avengers.
Offerman told Newsarama, “The most great superheroes I think too highly of to dishonour them by casting myself in their shoes. I tend to prefer the more modern teams of misfits. You know, actually, I auditioned for Wolverine when Bryan Singer made the first X-Men movie. I went on tape reading for that role. I always felt when I was younger, I could have taken a good crack at Wolverine.”
You can imagine Offerman keeping that famous moustache nice and tidy with Wolverine’s handy blades, but possibly not dominating the role in the same way that Hugh Jackman has done for so many years. In fact, it was Jackman who landed that part 25 years ago in X-Men, which proved to be a sizable hit for Singer and Marvel, raking in $300million at the box office and uniting a cast of stars including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Halle Berry.
Coming up, Offerman will continue to diversify by doing another animation, Sonic the Hedgehog 4, plus, much more excitingly, he will play a big part in Alex Garland’s sprawlingly epic adaptation of the video game The Elden Ring, which doesn’t frustratingly come out until 2028 but promises to be brilliant, because it’s Garland and because it’s A24.
