Although I'm sure many of you already know the identity of the villain in LOGAN, I'd consider the following to be a spoiler if you haven't yet seen the film and are eagerly awaiting its release on Bluray/DVD. After playing the role for close to two decades, Hugh Jackman decided to hang up his claws after one final outing. Thankfully, James Mangold's LOGAN provided a gritty yet touching conclusion to Jackman's tenure as Wolverine, but that doesn't mean that it was entirely smooth sailing, particularly when it came to LOGAN's secret villain.
LOGAN contained several surprises which were kept out of its marketing campaign, including the reveal of X-24, a feral clone of Wolverine, part-way through the film. As Hugh Jackman would be playing both Logan and the younger X-24, he told Collider that he was initially skeptical about playing the X-24 role and that it led to some heated discussions.
I was very skeptical of having X-24 being played by me. 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.’ 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 (laughs).
It's almost a minor miracle that X-24's involvement in the film was kept under wraps for so long, which Hugh Jackman found to be quite impressive in this age of spoilers and set-photos. "I’ve gotta give props to the crew and the cast, no one spilled the beans," said Jackman. "I hadn’t thought about it until just now. But it’s fun being in screenings and watching people gasp. They do not see it coming."
LOGAN is now available on Digital HD, but will be released on Blu-ray/DVD on May 23rd.
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