Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine has defined the Fox era of X-Men movies. His storied tenure from the 2000 film all the way up to Logan gave us perhaps one of the most definitive live-action superhero performances of our lifetime. That makes the temptation of his return in Deadpool & Wolverine so potent—but for Marvel Studios’ head honcho, it was almost a curse.
“I said, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Hugh. Don’t come back’,” Feige recently told Empire about advising Jackman on a potential return to the character he’d stunningly bid farewell to in 2017’s Logan. “‘You had the greatest ending in history with Logan. That’s not something we should undo.’” But Feige’s advice actually pushed Jackman to really consider what he’d want out of a return.
“I was about an hour into the drive,” Jackman said of his headspace after initial pitches. “And that question came into my head: ‘What do I want to do?’ And as soon as I asked the question, I wanted to do Deadpool & Wolverine. I just knew it. I drove for another hour. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I got out of the car, called Ryan [Reynolds], and said, ‘Ryan, if you’ll have me, I’m in.’”
What Jackman wanted to do was not actually return to the same character we saw perish in Logan, but offer a new take on Wolverine that, while drawing on his presence in the history of the Fox X-Men saga and its myriad permutations, also did something new with the character. Even if that ‘new’ was something as simple as finally letting Jackman put on the yellow spandex Logan and Cyclops had joked about way back in the first X-Men film. “We almost [had the suit on] in The Wolverine,” Jackman added. “But from the moment I put it on here, I was like, ‘How did we never do this?’ It looked so right, it felt so right. I was like, ‘That’s him.’ There are different sides of Wolverine we haven’t seen before in the movies. It was exciting for me.”
Hopefully we’ll see many more sides of Logan beyond just a costume change when Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters July 26.
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