It was actually the opposite. Halle Berry's popularity came after X-Men. Hugh Jackman was completely unknown outside of Australia (and he was brought in after Scott Bairstow decided he wanted to shoot Mission Impossible 2 instead), and Famke's only blockbuster movie at that point was playing a femme fatale in Goldeneye. The studio was aiming to cast it as cheaply as possible, since, at the time, comic book movies weren't surefire hits. Keep in mind, it wasn't until the success of the first X-Men film that studios realized they could make money off comic book movies, since the majority had been direct-to-video fare. :/ Or were made-for-TV, like the Generation X movie ( ... )