How Jerry Seinfeld convinced Hugh Jackman to quit playing Wolverine
Hugh Jackman is one of those annoying all-rounder talents who’d be very easy to dislike, but rather like Ryan Gosling, he makes it impossible by being a really nice guy. He can sing, he can dance, he’s muscle-bound, he’s handsome, he’s an amazing actor, and he even has steel claws for fingers. Actually, ignore that last one.
Either way, Jackman has been around for a long time now, going from musicals like Les Misérables to Marvel movies like X-Men and back to musicals like The Greatest Showman without any issue at all, and doing it with a smile on his face while raking in millions.
The Australian started off in musical theatre in the late 1990s, including a spell on London’s West End, before he got that breakthrough as Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men franchise, beginning in 2000. It went on to be the role he is perhaps still best known for as he played it in ten films over the course of 24 years, including the critically acclaimed Logan in 2017.
That was a gritty, stand-alone movie that wowed critics, taking a far more mature approach to the character and grossing an incredible $600million at the box office. It showed off Jackman’s acting chops to an impressive degree, something he’d previously displayed a few years earlier in a film called Prisoners, which not many people know but should.
Directed by Denis Villeneuve, it is a dark and twisty affair that stays long in the mind. Jackman stars alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in the tale of two young girls who are abducted, with the father of one of the girls deciding to take the law into his own hands, and a detective trying to find them. It is a career-high performance from Jackman, and one scene in particular involving him, a sink and a hammer was so emotive and fraught with anger that it caused his other co-star, Paul Dano, to collapse in fear.
Back to Wolverine, though, the character so synonymous with Jackman that he has spent almost half of his life with that pointy hairdo and fangs, battling with himself on when would be right to retire from playing the role after Logan. Once he did, he stayed away from it for seven years until pairing up with Ryan Reynolds in 2024’s Marvel comedy Deadpool & Wolverine.
One unusual source of advice he sought was from legendary comic Jerry Seinfeld, someone who had his own retirement decision to make when he brought his smash-hit namesake sitcom Seinfeld to a close after nine seasons, with a final episode that was watched by a record number of people— a crowd even formed in Times Square to watch it. It seemed the New York comedian had some sage words for the Aussie.
Jackman revealed: “What happened was, I had a dinner with Jerry Seinfeld, who’s a friend of mine. I was asking him about the end of the series. I said, ‘How did you decide?’ And, long story, he kind of said, ‘Look, I’ve always believed, creatively, you should never spend everything…because it’s almost Herculean to start up again. You should always have something in the tank. Leave the party before it gets too late kind of theory. And then somehow it spurs you into the next thing.”
Jackman certainly went out on a high with Logan. At the time of release, it was the third biggest-grossing R-rated release in history, and the actor was nominated for several major awards for his performance.
