Hugh Jackman Confesses to Early Performance Anxieties Playing Wolverine
Hugh Jackman is set to bare his claws one last time as Wolverine when Logan claws its way into theaters in March — the actor’s eighth (and reportedly final) big-screen go-round as the most popular X-Men character. While the Marvel mutant has been the signature role of the Australian actor’s career, Jackman revealed last night that it wasn’t always smooth sailing, thanks to some early difficulties on the set of Bryan Singer’s franchise-starter.
Related: We Saw 40 Minutes of ‘Logan,’ and It’s Going to Change Superhero Movies
As reported by E! News, Jackman attended last night’s Producers Guild Awards to bestow the Milestone Award to Fox exec Tom Rothman. While there, he admitted that he had considerable difficulty first getting into the role of Wolverine on Singer’s 2000 hit X-Men:
“I was kind of struggling, to be honest. It was the first movie I had ever done in America. I was pretty tight. I was nervous. I was average, to be honest, at best. No one was saying anything and I sort of thought I was getting away with it, but I wasn’t…He [Rothman] told me that he believed in me, that from the moment he’d seen my tape he had a gut feeling I was the guy, but watching my dailies was like watching someone put a lampshade over a light.”
It’s a surprising confession from the 48-year-old actor, given that X-Men immediately launched him to Hollywood stardom, and his subsequent turns as the furious mutant hero have been the lynchpin of Fox’s entire X-Men franchise. No such performance anxieties should affect Logan, which is set to be one of the year’s biggest — and most unique — superhero sagas when it lands in theaters on March 3.
And after that? Jackman may be claiming he’s done, but we trust Ryan Reynolds will do his best to convince him to join forces with Deadpool for a future dream-team-up.
‘Logan’: Watch a trailer:
