If you’re a reader, 2026’s movie and TV schedule ought to make you pretty happy.
From all-new Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility adaptations to the controversial Wuthering Heights and yet another instalment in the Dune franchise, book adaptations abound.
Still, not every Project Hail Mary viewer needs to have read the 2021 novel it’s based on to enjoy the movie. And some actors have given incredible performances in film and TV adaptations, despite having never so much as opened the original text.
Here are just a few stars who went in cold:
1) Not only had Hugh Jackman not read the X-Men comics before Wolverine, he reportedly didn’t even know wolverines existed
“I knew nothing,” the actor told Men’s Health. “I didn’t even know a wolverine was a real thing.
“I remember going to an IMAX, watching a documentary on wolves, [and] thinking Wolverine was part wolf.”
He also said that Wolverine’s director told him to “go to the zoo” after he started moving like a wolf on set.
Hugh has also claimed comics were banned on the set of 2000’s X-Men – he said director “Bryan Singer had this thing that people would think he really wanted to take comic book characters seriously, as real three-dimensional characters, that people who don’t understand these comics might think they’re two-dimensional, so no one was allowed [comics]”.
2) Ella Bruccoleri thought Austen was “posh” before landing The Other Bennett Sister
The Other Bennet Sister’s star, Ella Bruccoleri, said she’d she’d never read Pride and Prejudice, on which both Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister novel and its following BBC period drama are based, before landing the part.
“It’s mad, isn’t it? But I’m from North Yorkshire, and I just thought Jane Austen wasn’t a writer for me. She was more for posh southern people. I used to read loads of Brontë because that was the world I was from,” the actor said.
Still, she’s since read – and praised – the iconic novel.
3) Billy Burke had no idea about Twilight before he accepted the role of Charlie Swan
He told Collider, “I had no idea what Twilight was, at all. [Director] Catherine Hardwicke had seen a movie that I did a number of years ago, called Dill Scallion, and she requested to have me in.
“So, I came in, and we talked a little bit about it… But I just thought it was a really nice love story. I didn’t really pay attention to the whole vampire aspect, actually.”
“I haven’t read the books; I still have not cracked… I’m not a good reader — I can’t sit down and read books very well; I don’t have the attention span,” the actor added.
4) Viggo Mortensen only accepted the role of Aragorn because his son was a Lord of the Rings super-fan
Originally, Viggo’s part was meant to go to 27-year-old Stuart Townsend; he was a last-minute replacement. It took his super-fan son’s encouragement to make the actor accept his part.
Viggo hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings at this point: his son “knew the story, you know. I didn’t” (to be fair, Viggo was familiar with The Hobbit).
He later told Yahoo! Entertainment that he “felt unprepared” for the role. But now, it seems he’s so familiar with the source text that he turned down a cameo in The Hobbit due to his loyalty to the novels: “Before they started shooting, back in 2008, one of the producers did ask if I would be interested.
“I said, ‘You do know, don’t you, that Aragorn isn’t in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?’” he revealed.
5) If you think that’s bad, Elijah Wood only started the Lord of the Rings books this year
In 2021, Elijah Wood, who plays Frodo in the franchise, told Esquire: “The book is dense and verbose and incredible and literary and beautiful, but heavy.
“I found it taxing to read the book with all the work in tandem I was doing on my character. I sort of pivoted my focus to just live in the world of the character as written in the scripts and trust the process.”
At the time, he added: “I still haven’t read it, 20 years later. It’s ridiculous that I haven’t. It is my cross to bear. It’s so dumb. Everybody else has read it”.
Later, speaking on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert decades after his Lord Of The Rings debut, said, “25 years later… I have started” reading the books.
To be fair, he also said they were “incredible”.
6) Ewan McGregor never read Jane Austen’s Emma before playing Frank Churchill
At least, that’s according to The Guardian, in an article where he described the role as the worst thing he’d done, work-wise.
“I made the decision to do that film because I thought I should be seen to be doing something different from Trainspotting. My decision-making was wrong. It’s the only time I’ve done that,” he confessed.
7) Maisie Williams wasn’t deemed old enough to read Game of Thrones when she joined the HBO show (which is fair enough, really)
Maisie was just 12 when she was cast as Arya Stark. So perhaps it’s not all that surprising that she told Deadline, “my mum deemed [the very explicit books] inappropriate. But also, at the time, I didn’t really understand the importance of that in my craft.
“I was a non-actor, never trained, and I never really had any passion for reading. I just was Arya when I was younger, and that’s kind of the way it worked out… I brought what I brought to Arya, and I’m thrilled with the character I’ve strangely created now.”
She added, “It would be amazing to go back and read them after the fact and see exactly what she was supposed to be like. But I keep thinking how funny it’d be if someone sees me on the Underground reading Game Of Thrones”.
8) Rebecca Ferguson didn’t finish Dune before playing Lady Jessica
Dune is a towering six-part series, but the movies have only focused on the first influential book so far. Still, Rebecca told Empire the 600-plus-page-book was hard to wrap her head around at first.
“When I eventually started reading the book, I found it so complex and difficult, I didn’t finish it. It was like doing a crossword puzzle: ‘What’s in the middle of a stone?’ and I’m going, ‘I don’t know – a hard f*cking material?’ and then it’s like the letters in the middle of the word,” she said.
“My mindset was not there… I eventually sat down with [director] Denis [Villeneuve] and said, ‘I don’t get the book. Can you please explain it to me as if I’m a child?’”