After eight ilms and well over a decade as the
quick-healing breakout star of the X-Men ilms,
Hugh Jackman was beginning to wonder when
the time would come to step away from his
signature role. At Seinfeld’s birthday party in
April 2014, he asked for advice that changed
his life. “He doesn’t particularly like parties,
and I’m a little the same,” says Jackman of the
legendary comedian. “So we always end up in
a corner chatting. I started asking about Seinfeld.
Jerry said, ‘I always had a belief that creatively
you should leave on a high.’ Not just for legacy,
though I’m sure that was a part of it. But he said
that if you are tapped out, it’s Herculean to work
out what the next thing is. If you leave something
in the tank creatively, then you just spark onto
the next thing. I went home from that dinner, and
I just knew. This was it.”
Excited, Jackman recorded his thoughts
as a voice memo on his cell phone. Then, the
next morning, he emailed senior executives at
20th Century Fox, proposing he make one inal
solo ilm as Logan/Wolverine, before hanging
up the mutant’s claws for good. He wanted his
swansong to be something different, a character-
focused drama pitched somewhere between
Unforgiven and The Wrestler in tone. “I was
expecting a little more resistance, I suppose,
at the studio level,” he recalls. “But I didn’t
get that at all.”
The result is Logan. And it could be the
most surprising comic-book ilm yet.JACKMAN’S PITCH DEPENDED on a key
collaborator, The Wolverine director James
Mangold. The pair had chatted, on the set of
that 2013 ilm, about their ideal story for the
character — and miraculously the studio was
willing to support their new, dialled-back vision.
Mangold shaped Logan’s narrative and co-
wrote the script with Scott Frank. In addition
to Unforgiven and The Wrestler, he drew on
classic Western Shane (which plays on TV at
one point in the ilm). He gave the story a
father-son element, in the relationship between
Logan and the ageing Charles Xavier (Patrick
Stewart), and a father-daughter dynamic with
an 11-year-old named Laura (Dafne Keen).
Then he decided to put Wolverine on wheels.
“The idea of a road picture with Logan,
Laura and Xavier in an average car was a driving
image for me,” says Mangold, pun quite possibly
intended. “Taking heroes and putting them innormalcy — and nothing makes them more
normal than to cram them into a car and make
them have to deal with each other — that seemed
the ultimate contradiction of what tentpole
movies tend to do.”
The scale would be huge, with the kind
of widescreen vistas usually reserved for
Westerns. “This must be one of the biggest road
movies done in a while,” says Jackman. But the
radical aim was to give the ilm an intimate,
independent feel a world away from the glossy
superhero norm, including previous X-Men
instalments. “It’s a darker version of Little Miss
Sunshine, with the three of us on the road,” the
star laughs. “Slightly more violence!”
The action would be relatively low-key.
A script page tweeted by Mangold in October
includes a note speciically disavowing the usual
“CG fuckathon”. Boyd Holbrook, who plays
villain Donald Pierce, says, “There was a note
in the script that, basically, if a building falls
on you, you die. Every relationship is really
thought about and connected; it’s rooted in
something real. We were constantly talking about
the line between fantasy and reality.”
As for the lead character, Mangold and
Frank began to consider how far they could
move away from the usual super-punching.
Mangold concluded that there is actually no
superhero genre: “It’s a term of marketing and
origin, but most superhero ilms are war pictures,
Westerns and gangster movies.” The challenge
was to overturn the audience’s expectation and
ind a new way to approach a near-unkillable
mutant. And almost unheard of in modern
blockbusters, the ilm wasn’t greenlit until
Jackman and Mangold were entirely happy with
the inished script, and wasn’t given a release date
until well into production.
So the opening scene of the movie sees
a greying, grizzled Logan — hands shaking;
reliant on alcohol and pain medication —
brutally beaten by four human hoodlums. “It’s
set up typically: here come the douchebags,
and Logan’s going to take them out,” grins
Jackman. “And then he gets the shit kicked out
of him. I just loved the tone that was set by that.”
This is a near-future, one in which no new
mutants have been born in two decades. As
their numbers dwindled, Professor X’s dreams
of a new stage in evolution slowly died. Logan is
scraping a living as a limo driver in a town on the
Mexican border and hustling for medication that
he takes south to a remote, makeshift home heshares with Caliban (Stephen Merchant on
non-comedic form), nursemaid to the inirm
Xavier. But when a mysterious woman (Elizabeth
Rodriguez) asks for Logan’s help with Laura, he is
drawn back into action despite his hopelessness.
“At the beginning of this movie, he
100 per cent believes that the world would be
better off if he was never born,” says Jackman.
“Pain and destruction surround him, people
die around him. Through duty and through
love, I think, he is caring for Charles. But he
doesn’t have, within him, even the seeds of
hope and belief.”
Circumstances — namely Holbrook’s Pierce
and his Reavers, a team of former soldiers with
cyborg limbs — force Logan to go on the runIN THE END IT WAS
JERRY SEINFELD WHO
FINISHED OFF WOLVERINE.
Eleven-year-old Dafne
Keen as Laura, Logan’s
latest — and last? —
protégé/charge.