Director Matthew Vaughn Quit ‘X-Men 3’ After Exec Allegedly Tricked Halle Berry

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Matthew Vaughn is opening up about why he decided to reject directing the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand — and one of the “main reasons” involves Halle Berry.

“I went to an executive’s office and I saw an X3 script,” Vaughn, 52, said at a New York Comic Con panel on Saturday, October 14, without naming the exec. “It was a lot fatter. I asked, ‘What is this draft?’ They were like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ So I grabbed it, and opened the first page, and it said, ‘Africa. Kids dying from no water, and Storm creates a thunderstorm to save all these children.’”

Berry, 57, had played the superhero role of Storm in two X-Men movies prior to this one.

“I thought it was a pretty cool idea. I said, ‘What is this?’ They said, ‘This is the Halle Berry script, because she hasn’t signed on yet. This is what she wants it to be. And once she signs on, we’ll throw it in the bin.’ I thought, if you’re going to do that to an Oscar-winning actress who plays Storm, I quit,” he recalled.

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After Vaughn quit, the studio replaced him with Brett Ratner. Vaughn, however, did end up returning to direct X-Men: First Class in 2011, which featured a star-studded cast of Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy among others.

X-Men: The Last Stand did not include any of the scenes that Vaughn had read about in the script. But Berry did return to the film to reprise her role as Storm in the film and in X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014.

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While shooting in 2014, Berry was expecting her second child, her first with ex husband Oliver Martinez. (Berry and Martinez, 57, recently reached a settlement in their divorce nearly seven years after they split.)

“I wasn’t in [the movie] as much as I was meant to be,” she said at the time to Total Film. “[Pregnancy] kind of colored what my involvement could be, which was why I was one of the first ones in and the first ones out.”

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Berry added that her body changes added an extra hurdle to the filming process. “My ever-growing belly was posing a constant challenge!” she said. “What I could do was getting more limited, so the role I play is so different from what it could have been, due to my surprise pregnancy.”

Us Weekly confirmed in October 2013 that she and Martinez welcomed son Maceo.