It was a well-guarded secret for quite some time, but it turns out that the Wolverine was his own worst enemy in James Mangold's Logan. Hugh Jackman's final film as the character saw him face off against his own murderous clone, X-24, who ends up delivering the fatal blow to the hero in the closing moments of the film. While the villain thematically served as both a literal and figurative manifestation of Logan's darkest animal instincts, Jackman wasn't always so sold on portraying both hero and villain in his final outing.
"I was very skeptical of having X-24 being played by me," the actor explained to Collider. "I understood what it represented and thematically the idea of battling himself, which of course is right at the core of this character that we never fully got to, so I kind of loved the externalization of that. But I also know that myself as an actor and fans of Wolverine come up to me in the street every day and go, ‘We wanna see that full berserker animalistic crazy off-the-wall Wolverine,’ right? That we don’t feel we’ve fully seen it, so I was like, ‘Jim if we introduced halfway or near the end of the movie that full berserker animalistic crazy Wolverine and he’s somehow fighting our hero, audiences won’t know what to feel.’ And I remember him saying, ‘Trust me, trust me, trust me.’ And I was a bit of a pain in the ass on that one, I was like, ‘I’m just not sure. Let’s keep exploring it and exploring it.’"
Jackman admitted that watching the final cut of the film assuaged his fears, as he felt the character work — coupled with X-24's murder of Professor Xavier — assisted in presenting a defining line between the opposing characters. "When I saw the movie it’s just clear, for some reason I think because he skewers Patrick Stewart in that moment the audience just sort of hates him. We did some subtle things, I changed the bridge of my nose, I wore contacts — I just wanted him to look a little different from myself. And I think by that point we’d created already the Wolverine that people wanted to see. So anyway, that was one of my examples of being wrong."
Did you enjoy the film's vicious villain or would you have preferred an alternative? Let us know in the comments! Logan is now available for digital download and will be available for home video release on May 23rd, 2017.