Hugh Jackman Talks About Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wolverine”

Hugh Jackman recently spoke to the LA Times about his next trip into the mind of Wolverine.  I’m not jumping out of my pants in excitement because I have been burned by this franchise twice now, but it is certainly more intriguing with an Oscar nominee at the helm.  I have heard nothing but praise about the source material of Wolverine going to Japan to train, and I like that they say this film will be unrelated to all the other films. 

I’m really, really pumped about it. I feel like all the planets are finally aligned to make a great movie. We finally have the character and with this mythology — ever since [the 2000 Bryan Singer film] X-Men, when I was kind of hanging around and reading all these comics, because I was cast before I ever read any X-Men comics, so I was trying to get my hands on everything. I remember saying to [producer] Lauren Shuler Donner, ‘Lauren, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen this Japanese story, and I think it’s so good. It’s just genius, it’s brilliant.’ And we kind of always talked about it from there on.

I sort of even wanted to do that in the third X-Men movie at first, but we thought, no, we really need to establish who he is at first, and we did that [with X-Men Origins: Wolverine], and now this is sort of the cherry on top, to finally do it and haveDarren Aronofsky direct it. I love his gung-ho attitude toward it and great vision. Straight off, it’s not a sequel, it’s a stand-alone, and I think we’re going to make one that people will describe as the best of the bunch.

I don’t know how much I want to give away about it, but Darren said with the last one, ‘Hey you looked great, but you’re so tall that in those long shots you looked kind of like Clint Eastwood, and that’s not Wolverine.’ He said that Wolverine, in the comics, is powerful, stocky, you know, he’s short and thick. So he said, ‘I want you to go there, get bigger.’ He’s going to come down after he gets done with all the black-tie events over and done with.

Yeah, he’s thick and it’s chunky and it’s powerful. I always think of Mike Tyson when he first came on the scene. Sometimes, he was a full foot shorter than his opponents and bent over [with this] massive build. There’s real power. You said bulldog, and that’s it exactly. Exactly. That’s what I’m going for, and if I have a massive heart attack first, well, you tell everyone what I was going for.

Check out the full interview and article here.