The former X-Men star Hugh Jackman disclosed that he was inspired to quit playing Wolverine by Jerry Seinfeld. He was having a dinner with the Seinfeld maker when he received some creating inputs which made him decide about hanging up his claws for good.
“What happened was I had a dinner with Jerry Seinfeld, who’s a friend of mine. I was asking him about the end of the series. I said, ‘How did you decide?’ And, long story, he kind of said, ‘Look, I’ve always believed, creatively, you should never spend everything… because it’s almost Herculean to start up again. You should always have something in the tank. Leave the party before it gets too late kind of theory. And then somehow it spurs you into the next thing,’” he told Willem Defoe during his appearance on Variety’s “Actors on Actors.”
“As he was talking, I went home, and I said to [his wife] Deb on my way home in a cab… ‘This is the last one.’ She goes, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I just know this is the last one,’” Jackman went on.
“I woke up the next morning with this very strong idea, which [Logandirector] Jim Mangold and I had been working on, of treating it not like a comic book movie in any way, treating him not like a superhero but as a human being who’s lived a life of violence and let’s make a movie about the ramifications of violence,” he explained. “I was thinking The Wrestler. I was thinking Unforgiven… The moment I’d had that thought I was supercharged, super excited, absolutely sure I’d never play it again and very nervous.”
Jackman had first played Wolverine in the 2000 movie X-Men. During the last 17 years, he reprised the role in eight X-Men movies including X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse. He finished playing Wolverine in Logan, which featured the lead character in a dystopian future where an aging Professor X had murdered the X-Men by mistake.
The James Mangold movie Logan is now available on 4K, DVD, and Digital HD. The movie stars Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Boyd Holbrook, Stephen Merchant, Richard E. Grant, and Dafne Keen.
