“Missed opportunity”: the one regret Hugh Jackman has about playing Wolverine
The easiest way to marvel – pun possibly intended – at how long Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine is to look at the revolving door of actors who have inhabited some of cinema’s other most notable superheroes. When he was first cast as the mutton-chopped mutant in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, the most recent actor to have played Batman on the big screen was George Clooney, and it would be another five years before Christian Bale donned the cape and cowl in Batman Begins.
Since then, Bale has completed a trilogy, with Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson suiting up and reporting for duty, not to mention Michael Keaton and Clooney both returning in The Flash, or even the latest reboot being spearheaded by James Gunn’s DC Studios.
When X-Men hit cinemas, there hadn’t been a Superman movie for 13 years, but Jackman hasn’t only outlasted Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill. He’s still around and kicking as Wolverine with David Corenswet’s reboot in the midst of production, never mind Taylor Hoechlin’s four seasons headlining Superman & Lois on TV.
He was Wolverine before Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man, and he’s still Wolverine after Andrew Garfield was cast and recast again in the form of Tom Holland. Jackman’s latest outing features him alongside Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, coming three years after all three Peter Parkers united in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s No Way Home.
The actor’s first love will always be the stage, but history will remember him first and foremost as the guy who dedicated a quarter of a century of his life and at least ten entries in his filmography to embodying the angriest X-Man of them all. The consistency has veered wildly, though, with Jackman admitting that it wasn’t until his final solo film that he felt as if he’d gotten it right.
James Mangold’s Logan opted for an R-rating and shuffled itself inside the parameters of the neo-Western, with the title hero operating as an ageing gunslinger ready to embrace the ultimate fate so long as he’s able to go out on his sword. It was supposed to be his swansong, but as he shared with Variety, at the time, he regretted not approaching the part that way sooner.
“I wish I’d started playing him like that 17 years ago,” he said. “So there’s some sense of missed opportunity, but when I saw Logan, I sat there, and I did have tears in my eyes. The man feeling I had was, ‘There, that’s the character. I feel like I’ve done it now.’ And I was calm and at peace.”
The fourth-wall-breaking and self-awareness of Deadpool & Wolverine presents the opportunity for a completely different kind of performance, with Jackman dusting off the claws to bring everything he’s learned over the last 25 years to the table.
