‘The character I play is actually only 1.6m [5ft 3in]. Before I had any kind of acting profile I was encouraged to lie about my height. I was told to say I was about 6ft [1.83m] tall. I was worried about it when I first had my audition because pleasing fans of the franchise was important.’
In fact, the subject of his height came up in discussions on the internet; fans didn’t think it was right. A lot of people who saw the film and had never met him thought he was very short: ‘James Marsden, who played Cyclops, who is only 10cm [4 in] shorter than me, was put on boxes and platforms in our scenes together. You’ll notice that every character in X-Men looked taller than me,’ Hugh explained.
Aside from the height issue, the director and Hugh both knew that the look of the character was ultimately important. He needed to look real, stylish and cool, yet recognisable to fans. The last thing they wanted was another comical Dick Tracy character. Hugh had three weeks of hair and make-up tests, and at one point had 14 people around his chair in the trailer checking out his mane. Until he could grow a beard, they had to add hair extensions, and they used a ton of hairspray to get the big-haired look of Wolverine.
They also gave him a set of dangerous 9in claws, which were extremely tough to get used to wearing. The first pair he wore were made of steel. Hugh said, ‘These looked great, but I couldn’t fight with them. I punctured myself. I hit myself with them and cut my head open. I was fighting with one of the stunt women and something happened and one of the claws went straight into her. And I stopped and looked at her arm and it was bleeding badly. She screamed out. “Yes, I’ve been stabbed by Wolverine!”’ Everyone stood around shaking their heads at the joy which was evident in the girl’s face. ‘But that’s stunt people for you,’ Hugh added.
On the other hand (or the other claw!), they had some fun with them too. Between takes, Hugh would often stick marshmallows on his claws and roast them over the fire, while the crew jokingly fabricated him new ‘claws’ – one hand featured a pair of scissors, another had a magnifying glass taped to it.
Around 700 pairs of Wolverine claws were constructed for the original X-Men film. They were made of metal for close-ups, plastic for longer shots and rubber for stunts. Each pair was specially fitted for Jackman or his stuntman. The special-effects crew also made an incredible replica of the star’s arm so they could film the claws physically popping out without using digital effects, which proved extremely expensive as it was only used once.
Hugh confessed he had never read any of the comics, dubbed in many quarters as the ‘thinking man’s comic book’, but he soon found out there were thousands who did – in Australia, and everywhere else, for that matter. In fact, people were extremely passionate about the books, especially the Wolverine character. Hugh believed that playing someone who was still alive, like Will Smith did when he played Muhammad Ali, was a high-pressure job, but in a way, playing a fictional character who is larger than life in so many people’s minds, and an idol to so many grown men, was even tougher. At Halloween, hundreds of kids want to be Wolverine; forty-year-old men get their favourite X-Men character tattooed on their backs. Some even name their dogs Logan (Wolverine’s civilian name) after the rebellious mutant.
Mutton chops and big hair aside, being thrown into the role a week into filming didn’t leave Hugh any time to get to understand or grasp the inner workings of his character. Even though Bryan Singer didn’t want his cast to look at the old comic books, as he wanted the actors to bring their own personalities to the roles, Hugh secretly read the comic strips, falling in love with the artwork: ‘I feel like a lot of what’s in the comic books informed me in the way I approached the role physically. For instance, a battle in a comic book might take four pages, but you’re only shown sixteen images or so of a character. In that space the reader is conveyed all the physical and emotional ups and downs of a big battle. It’s amazing how compacted it was.’ He tried to incorporate the images that stuck in his head into Wolverine’s fighting stances and techniques.
One of the hardest things for him to capture was Logan’s aggression, an emotion that he had sometimes failed to achieve during his time at acting school. He knew there must be a beast inside him dying to get out; he just needed to find some inspiration to unleash it. And so he called on his favourite play in drama school, The Bacchae, a gruesome Greek tragedy about a king who literally gets eaten alive by a group of women in a kind of orgy. ‘I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires. I think Wolverine represents that in its most allegorical sense. He’s a man who battles between the animal and the human, between the chaos in him and the self-control he must have. We all deal with this to some extent. At which point should we let go and do what we want to do? And when should we submit to rules? Coming to terms with our true natures and who we really are has always been a fascination to humans. I know it fascinates me.’
And he even studied how wolves react in the wild, a technique he had learnt while in drama school. He visited a science museum, where they had a section on wolves on a 3D dome movie screen. As he sat there and watched, he was mesmerised by the way the wolves kept their noses close to the ground. One of Wolverine’s characteristics is his extra-sensitive sense of smell, and Hugh tried to incorporate these animal-like actions into his film character.
The Wolverine character is ultimately a good guy who is very angry inside, so he also took inspiration from two famous characters. Jean-Pierre Rives, a good-looking, blonde-haired French international rugby player and captain, is one of Hugh’s sporting heroes. He remembered growing up and seeing Rives running around like a mad terrier with blood pouring down his face in almost every game. It was an image that stuck with most kids who watched the sport at that time: ‘And then I get a role like this and I think I am that terrier, I am Jean-Pierre Rives.’ The other was a young Mike Tyson. Hugh drew on the boxer’s habit of prowling the ring, all-powerful and compact, before the opening bell.
He used the images to instigate controlled aggression within himself, but the significant turning point came one icy morning in the middle of winter in Toronto, where they were shooting: Hugh took a cold shower by mistake. His wife was sleeping in the next room and so he couldn’t scream. He stood there for a minute holding all the emotion in and suddenly realised this was exactly the way Logan must have felt – he wanted to yell and punch someone’s head in, but couldn’t. From then on, every morning before Hugh went on set, he took a cold shower to remind himself of what he needed to do.
However, sometimes getting pumped up too much caused some problems that ended up being quite painful for the star. In one scene he got into character and while leaping off a 6ft wall, thinking he was invincible, he caught his testicles and ended up rolling around in agony. After that particular incident, he decided to leave the more dangerous stunts to his double, Steve, which also pleased the studio and the insurance company.
It was only after he started to master the inner character and take comfort in what he was trying to achieve that Hugh really started to take notice of the powerful meaning behind the script – people isolated from society, treated with hatred and suspicion because of special gifts they possessed. The story explored how the superheroes coped with the gifts that made them powerful and respected, yet weak and misunderstood. In a strange way it brought back memories for Hugh of his parents’ split and the way people had treated him like some kind of misfit or outsider. He found the story easy to relate to.
When filming started, he felt as if he was stepping into a completely different world, a world unlike anything else he had been used to. It was the biggest movie he had ever done. The budget for Erskineville Kings had been under one million dollars, while Paperback Hero was considerably less than that. And now, here he was starring in something where the budget ran into tens of millions of dollars.
The first night of filming summed up just how bizarre it really was. An outdoor sequence was being filmed at the train station and Hugh went along to watch. ‘I remember
pulling up and it was like going to a Rolling Stones concert. There must have been about 400 people there, cast, crew and extras. There were these big balloons on which they hung the lights, way up in the sky, which lit up the entire area. It was a surreal feeling.’ Someone showed him to his trailer, which was so big that it was the size of the pub back home, and a while later, when he was sitting in there, someone else popped their head in to apologise about the size of the trailer and said that the real one would be coming in on Monday.
Another thing that took Hugh ‘a while to get used to’ was the amount of time it took to get him ready for each scene, even though this was nothing compared to what some of the other actors had to endure. He still has an enormous respect for Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who played Mystique. Her elaborate blue cosmetic coating alone took eight hours daily to apply to her naked skin and an additional two hours to remove. And that wasn’t the worst of it: during that time she couldn’t drink wine, use skin creams or fly the day before filming because the change in body chemistry would cause the 100 prosthetic pieces to fall off. In between takes, she was kept isolated in a windowless room to ensure her look remained secret. To celebrate her last day on set, Rebecca brought in a bottle of tequila and did shots with her fellow cast and crew members during a break in filming. Unfortunately, that day she happened to be filming the Wolverine versus Mystique fight scene (which she did in her birthday suit). Later, she threw up blue-coloured vomit from all the chemicals in her make-up – all over Hugh.
Aside from the huge boost in his career, another massive bonus for Hugh was the opportunity to work alongside, in his eyes, two of the greatest actors alive today; Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen. He described them as the English versions of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It was more than an honour; working with the Shakespearean actors from years ago was like a dream come true. Ian McKellen was a hero of Hugh’s and he had watched him on stage years before playing Macbeth. ‘To actually work with them, I had to kind of forget that I was a little bit in awe and remember that as Wolverine, I couldn’t give a stuff who they were. We have this design of them as doyens of the theatre, but both of them love acting and are also surprisingly silly and childlike.’
The scenes between the two great actors fascinated and excited Hugh. Both had a very English way of acting, which is more about what the character doesn’t say than what it actually does: ‘They had a beautiful way of playing that. There was so much going on underneath the surface and in the pauses, and when they just stopped to listen. It is an English tradition, particularly with the last generation of actors, which you see in Ben Kingsley, Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart; it’s their ability to be irreverent and playful, and emotionally full and open, yet intellectually rigorous. I think their intellectual rigor is extraordinary, the way they attack the text.’
Despite all the positives associated with the production, the journey to get the movie into the cinemas was troubled. The release date, originally scheduled for Christmas 2000, was brought forward to the main summer slot due to a rescheduling of some of Fox’s other films that year. It caused a race against time, and director Singer barely completed it in time for its release date, prompting Fox to cancel a June press junket to promote X-Men.
However, the buzz over the X-Men film spread from coast to coast in the states and then quickly spread around the world without the extra promotion. Despite the sceptics, and the advice given to Hugh to book another gig before the film came out in the event of it being a flop, there were massive crowds of fans camped out in front of Los Angeles theatres to buy tickets on opening night. Indeed, the gamble to bring the comic books to life paid off handsomely: X-Men brought in $57 million in its opening weekend, breaking a box-office debut record for non-sequel films. Hugh remarked, ‘I think the studio was nervous leading up to the release. No one expected the opening we had on the first X-Men. I think it really shocked a lot of people. It became a phenomenon overnight.’ The film eventually grossed $157 million and was the ninth highest-grossing movie of 2000. It was also great news for Marvel, not only in comic book sales but also for the potential of bringing other Marvel hero characters like Spiderman, Captain America and Ghost Rider to life.
Even the most hardened of Wolverine fans melted when they witnessed how Hugh brought the comic book Wolverine, an edgy and conflicted character, to vivid life, lending his considerable presence to the role. He effortlessly stepped into the character’s big shoes and didn’t once look out of place, bringing a rock-solid performance, smouldering temperament and a confused sensitivity to the complex Wolverine. In so doing, he won over both general audiences and fans of the cult hit comic book character alike.
‘Only after the film came out, and the fans came out, did I realise that if I’d done a bad job, not only would it have been the end of my career, but I would’ve been spat on in the street, you know? Because I met people who have their entire back tattooed with Wolverine. I mean, they are serious, trust me!’
Despite spending much of the film’s 104 minutes hidden behind some seriously bizarre hair, Hugh’s popularity and Australian heart-throb profile immediately started to grow. He had to quickly learn how to deal with notoriety in the United States. Before the movie he was relatively unknown there and didn’t mind the anonymity. Suddenly he found himself, and his much-photographed face, a hot commodity in Hollywood: ‘I was sort of thrilled, in a way, that I got the chance to play the character before I became famous. Once you start doing talk shows and people start to see your personality, it gets harder and harder to get away from that. So the fact that this was my first blockbuster film meant I got a role that I probably never would have if I’d been known for something else.’
Like Mel Gibson coming to life as Mad Max, or the cigar-smoking Clint Eastwood in the Fistful of Dollars spaghetti westerns, or John Travolta strutting his stuff in tight-fitting trousers in Saturday Night Fever, Wolverine was Hugh’s very own defining moment.
With the film’s success, he started to get a taste of what it was like to be an ‘X-Man’. Obsessed fans followed him around town, popping up at odd times and places. ‘I kind of keep wanting to say, “How the hell do you know where I am all the time? I don’t even know where I’m going. What’s going on here?”’
It was all quite overwhelming and it took a while for him to appreciate just how successful the film was. ‘If you’d asked me to play a game of, “Okay, you’re going to have a Hollywood career. What movie would be the one that would break you?” This would be a million miles away from what I would choose. I never in a million years would have guessed it would be this. I knew it was a great role once I read the script, and I was into it. I knew nothing about the comic book, but I’m like, “This is Dirty Harry, and this is kind of the Han Solo anti-hero thing that I kind of grew up with. I get, I think I’m onto a great role here.”’
Part of that role included going to the X-Men conventions held throughout the US, where whole displays were set up of all the X-Men paraphernalia. Hugh commented, ‘It was the closest thing to being a rock star.’
At one show, his wife couldn’t quite resist telling a five-year-old boy that the man she was with was Wolverine. The little kid looked up and stared at Hugh. In complete awe, his father said, ‘You’re Wolverine! So tell me about it! When’s the movie coming out? My son’s been waiting for so long!’ Hugh focused on the kid: ‘“So you watch X-Men?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Who’s your favourite character?” The child’s response? “Cyclops.”’
The entire merchandising around the film freaked Hugh out. There were dolls, pillowcases, rulers, magnets, wallpaper, towels and even a blow-up voice-activated punchbag, which he later got for his son. ‘At first I couldn’t believe I was doing a movie where I was going to be a doll, but when I saw them I thought it was kind of funny.’
He harked back to the day on set when the guy who had been designing the dolls came out with the prototype clay heads and all the leading actors had to look at them and give
their approval. Ian McKellen loved his, saying it looked young and nothing like him: ‘I love it, you can do it!’ he said. Hugh thought the same; he didn’t want his to look completely like him – ‘I don’t know why. People might start sticking forks into it or sticking it in the freezer, or even feeding it to the squids! There was even one figure that talked with my voice. How weird is that?’
As for encountering mobs of comic-book fans, he had no complaints. At first, he didn’t get mobbed because he wasn’t recognised but he still had the odd weird encounter with fans. The incident with Vinnie at Bobby’s restaurant in New York is one of his favourite anecdotes; he explained why: ‘The restaurant is owned by De Niro, so actors go there all the time, and Vinnie’s the manager. The waiter came up and said, “Are you the guy who plays Wolverine?” This is about the fourth time I’ve been there. I said, “Yeah, I am.” He said, “Oh my God, Vinnie’s a huge fan and really wants to see you. He’s over there, behind the counter.”
‘I look over, and there’s Vinnie, ducking behind his little booth, literally, ducking underneath. Ten minutes it took him to come and see me. And he came over in a sweat, sweating. I said, “Nice to meet you, Vinnie. Are you a fan?” He looked at me, he goes, “Am I a fan?” Then there was a silence. He took his shirt off, in the middle of his restaurant, he turned around, and he had a full colour tattoo of Wolverine on his back. He goes, “Am I a fan? Of Wolverine?” He got down on his knees, he was sweating, he said, “Thank you for doing the film! I loved the film! It’s fantastic!” My wife pulled out a camera and said, “Vinnie, do you want a few shots?” Well, Vinnie was doing the poses. He had his arm around me, he turned round and was flexing his back with the muscles. We took a whole roll of film for Vinnie and sent them to him. I think I ate there for free.’
A few months later, Hugh was at a launch of a film at Fox Studios along with Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Tom Cruise. They were standing around when he saw Dougray Scott, who was waving to him. The two men started chatting and Dougray told Hugh that he’d seen the movie and that he thought Hugh was fantastic in it. Hugh simply said he was sorry; he didn’t know what else to say, but the Scotsman shrugged his shoulders and simply replied, ‘Ah, that’s Hollywood, these things happen.’
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