THIS NEW WORLD would demand something
extraordinary to force Logan back into action.
It would, in fact, take a girl called Laura. She is
a scowling force of nature, as ferocious as she is
tiny, the latest in a series of youngsters for Logan
to take under his wing. “He’s archetypally the
reluctant hero,” says Jackman. “So the only place
where you can just see his heart open up is with
kids.” From Jubilee in the cartoons to the lost,
lonely Rogue of the irst X-Men, there’s something
in the combination of the wounded Wolverine and
a child that works — perhaps because he’s always
warier of them than the reverse.
But Laura is made of tougher stuff than
most; in fact, she’s made of exactly the same
stuff as Logan, with an adamantium skeleton and
regenerative powers. X-Men experts (X-perts?)
will know her better as X-23, a character created
in the early 1990s for animated TV series X-Men:
Evolution. In Logan, she’ll give her mentor a run
for his mutant money, in one intense scene making
him lose his temper. At Mangold’s insistence
Jackman gave it all he had. “I just yelled, ‘SHUT
THE FUCK UP!’ At the end of 40 minutes of
this I went up to Maria, Dafne’s mum, and I said,
‘Maria, I’ve got an 11-year-old and I’m just really
sorry.’ Maria said, ‘Aw, don’t worry, she just called
you a cunt. In Spanish.’”
Patrick Stewart was similarly enamoured
of his bilingual co-star. “Hugh and I adored
her. We all spent days together in that fuckingtruck, in 100-degree temperatures with
no air conditioning.”
With everyone feeling they were making
something special, cast and crew pushed
themselves harder than is standard on movies
that don’t feature a bear-attack. The desert shoot
required the crew to pump cool air into the
vehicle to keep the cast functional;altitude also
proved problematic. One action sequence saw
Jackman running up a hill, past various
obstacles. But the spectacular wooded landscape
of the shoot was at 9,000 feet above sea level, and
by the end of the irst day Jackman was falling
down before he reached the top. “The second-
unit director said, ‘Man, I think we should call it
a day.’ I said, ‘Naaah, mate, I just tripped.’Logan (Hugh Jackman)
and Xavier (Patrick
Stewart) are shadows
of their former selves.❯