Hugh Jackman Retrospective ( as Wolverine)

[jo]

There have been quite a few retrospectives of Hugh Jackman's portrayal of WOLVERINE/LOGAN.

There are those which was inspired by the LOGAN trailer music (HURT), such as this one --






Over the years, Hugh's acting seemed to have matured even more. He is now acting a lot with his eyes -- very simple but very expressive!


Jo

[jo]

This one focuses on the action highlights - with different mood music!

[jo]

For a chance of pace, here are 5 MOVIES WHERE HUGH JACKMAN WASN'T WOLVERINE !




I think PRISONERS and REAL STEEL/KATE AND LEOPOLD could have replaced CHAPPIE and EDDIE THE EAGLE in providing a more well-rounded gallery of non-Wolverine portrayals!

[jo]

Is he or isn't he... The Wolverine

[mamaleh]

Better choices than CHAPPIE and how! But at least that compilation included THE FOUNTAIN. If it serves to raise interest in and awareness of that underrated movie, so much the better.

Ellen

[jo]

Even the look gets a retrospective --






Er... wasn't the second image from XMen-3 when Wolverine was in some sort of wooded area and waiting for his opponents?


Isn't this the image associated with XMen-2, when Wolverine went on a berserker mode to fight off the incoming Stryker men into the mansion?

[jo]

A fan renders a tribute to Hugh Jackman as Wolverine --

The man. The story. The Legacy. Logan !

This is a humble tribute to Hugh Jackman as Wolverine for the phenomenal work he has done in the last couple of years.Sadly Logan is reported to be the film where Hugh would be dawning the mantle on silver screen for the last time most probably giving the character his long sorted peace in a rightful manner. It was truly a honor Sir to be one of your fan and this is just a humble thanksgiving to you.

Soundtrack used : Lost but Won - Hans Zimmer

[jo]

It's FANDANGO's turn to recognize the perfect casting of Hugh Jackman as WOLVERINE!


www.zimbio.com/Actors+Who+Nailed+It+When+Everyone+Said+They+Were+Miscast/articles/fG-zUT_8CFn/Hugh+Jackman+as+Wolverine

Hugh Jackman as Wolverine

Wolverine is the role that made Hugh Jackman's career, but his casting was not without controversy. Fans were skeptical of Jackman not only because he was a total unknown, but also because he was Australian, and he was way too tall. At 6-foot-2, Jackman is a full 11 inches taller than his comic book counterpart according to official stats. Fans at the time would have really lost their minds if they'd known Jackman didn't know anything about the comics and didn't even know wolverines were real animals. Turns out none of that mattered. He was perfect.

[jo]

[jo]

Fan art --

http://instagram.com/p/BPn1dMQAn-E

[jo]

Another one from year 2000 --

[jo]

Comicbook.com traces Hugh Jackman's journey as Wolverine!

comicbook.com/marvel/2017/01/28/hugh-jackmans-wolverine-look-from-every-x-men-movie

This March will mark the end of a superhero movie era.

Hugh Jackman has been playing James Howlett, a.k.a. Logan, a.k.a. the Wolverine for 17 years. Jackman debuted in the role in X-Men in 2000 and will play the role one last time for 2017's Logan.

While fans are looking forward to Logan, it's a bittersweet pill. While the trailers for Logan make the film look excellent, fans will be sad to see Jackman leave the iconic role behind.

With that in mind, ComicBook.com is looking back at Jackman's time playing Wolverine through the original X-Men trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and the Wolverine solo movie trilogy.

Check out the SLIDESHOW through the link.

[jo]

Empire shares their very first publicity cover for the XMEN franchise and comicbook character Wolverine --

Empire Magazine
Verified account
‏@empiremagazine Jan 26

This was the first time we had @realhughjackman's Wolverine on our cover, nearly seventeen years ago. #tbt

The EMPIRE Jackman double-cover issue completes the 17-year retrospective. The most recent double cover is not the first time that Hugh is featured twice solo on the magazine cover. I remember that they did that,too, for DAYS OF FUTURE PAST.

Have any collected all the issues over the years?

[jo]

It's hard not to feel teary-eyed with this tribute!

A Wolverine story -- told in narrative scenes from the various movies, against a poignant musical background!


Jo

[jo]

And another one --

[jo]

Against the background of "HURT", another THANK-YOU to HUGH!

[jo]

Geek Guardians
‏@geekguardians

So many years. So much awesomeness. So many epic moments taken from page to screen. One thing left to say. Thank you @realhughjackman.

[jo]

After 17 years, he can now eat pain-au-chocolat ( haha - he actually said "bread" to the French reporter) without guilt!



Maybe he got tired of posting all those yummy food photos and want to try all them out, to the fullest

I wonder what his BMI is ?

Jo

[jo]

The very first SNIKT!

[jo]

I had responded to a post talking about how the love ballad of Joe Gillis and Betty started residing in his head... look at how that piece of ATC exchange led to Wolverine discussions --

www.talkinbroadway.com/allthatchat_new/d.php?id=2364334

Please follow thru the sub-thread.


Last sentence from the poster's reply to me --

And Jackman has been quite vocal in acknowledging the importance of Wolverine in his career, and even made a special surprise appearance when Len was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Talking about Len -- I came across one of his blog entries :

Thursday night, T and I were Hugh Jackman's guests to see his new Broadway drama, A Steady Rain, also starring James Bond himself, Daniel Craig. It is a very good show made brilliant by two extraordinary performances. After the show, we were invited backstage, where the always-gentlemanly Hugh introduced us to the legendary Bernadette Peters (one of my idols) and superstar photographer Annie Liebovitz. It was a memorable evening, to say the least.

[jo]

Elizabeth Rappe used to write for a film blog ( but has now settled down to a more sedate lifestyle -- a vet) -- but I do remember how she liked to point out the strong points in Hugh's persona and talent --

More recently -- presumably after she must have seen that new clip " You Know the Drill" --

Elisabeth Rappe ‏@elisabethrappe 2h
2 hours ago

Tweeting about movies and life feels shameful in this ugly new world. :/




Elisabeth Rappe ‏@elisabethrappe 18m
18 minutes ago

That said, Hugh Jackman in a tanktop and sideburns is pretty much the pinnacle of perfection. It was always going to be downhill from there.

Roll back the years -- was this the very first time that he donned the famous Wolverine costume




XMEN: UNITED (aka XMen-2)
2003

[jo]

Excellent New York Times article/interview re Hugh Jackman and saying Goodbye to "Wolverine" --




Hugh Jackman, ahead of the release of “Logan,” his latest, and possibly last, portrayal of Wolverine, the Marvel superhero he has played since 2000.
Credit:Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times

Hugh Jackman on Nearing the End of Logan’s Run


Mr. Jackman, who has played Wolverine in X-Men films since 2000,
considers life after he retracts his adamantium claws for the final time.

By DAVE ITZKOFF

FEB. 15, 2017


The last time Hugh Jackman played Wolverine, the comic-book superhero he has portrayed onscreen for 17 years, was not an especially decorous occasion. In the midst of his work on a coming movie musical, he had to return for two days of reshoots on “Logan,” the 10th film in Fox’s X-Men franchise, to inflict some beatings and take some beatings, and he ended up shouting his voice hoarse.

“I yelled and screamed so much, and then I had to go back to the musical the next day,” a more restored Mr. Jackman recalled recently with a laugh. “I actually said to someone, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’”
His claw-popping alter ego fares no better in “Logan,” which opens March 3. Set in 2029, it finds the title character weary and weakened, unable to heal as rapidly as he used to. The X-Men are long gone, and he’s reduced to driving a limousine while he tends an aged Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), whose psychic powers have become a dangerous liability.

From the moment Mr. Jackman became a movie star, with the original “X-Men” in 2000, he has been synonymous with Wolverine, a feral mutant with a metal skeleton and a tormented, decades-long past lived under the name Logan. It is his most visible and successful role, and one that, as recently as late January, he still wasn’t finished with. Because there was always one more dialogue rerecording session or conversation to have with his director, “I’m uncomfortable saying goodbye,” he said.


And surely, it can’t be easy for Mr. Jackman to pull away from a role that he has inhabited longer than almost any other actor has been associated with a comic-book character or fantasy franchise — a span when genre mainstays like Batman, Spider-Man and Superman were each rebooted twice, and even his “X-Men” co-stars had to share custody of their parts with a younger class of actors.


By 20th CENTURY FOX PICTURES 1:52
Trailer: ‘Logan’


But asked if he envisions “Logan” as his final outing as Wolverine, he answered, “When I had the script, I was like, ‘Yes,’” he said. “And when I was shooting the movie, yes. As I sit here today, yes.”

“God knows how I’ll feel in three years,” he continued. “But right now, absolutely.”

Not that Mr. Jackman seemed all that devastated. Over breakfast at a boutique hotel in SoHo, this Australian-born performer, 48, was upbeat, convivial, crisply attired and almost too charming for an actor pitching a dystopian action movie. (Even with his announcement, made via Twitter on Monday, that he had been treated for another basal cell carcinoma, he tries to find positivity and humor: Along with a photo of himself, with a treatment on his nose, he wrote, “Looks worse w the dressing on then off!”) He’s not big on career retrospectives, and not inclined to ask, as his Jean Valjean memorably did in “Les Misérables,” who am I?
But what happens if and when he bids farewell to the one constant in his film career; who’s left behind when you subtract this X-factor?

“Let’s be clear — I’m not retiring,” Mr. Jackman said. Yet for as many times as he has played the character, in the “X-Men” series and solo “Wolverine” movies, he said, “there’s been a gnawing turmoil that I hadn’t really nailed it, fully — either story or performance or whatever.”

It’s not just the X-movies, he said: “Every film I’ve ever done, I’ve had that gnawing doubt. But I have it way less in this one.”



Mr. Jackman was hardly an unknown when he was first considered for Wolverine, having already performed on Australian TV and onstage, and having received wide acclaim for playing Curly in a 1998 West End revival of “Oklahoma!”

It was after a matinee of that show that Mr. Jackman whipped off his leather chaps and rushed out, his hair in a perm, to a London casting office to put himself on tape for an “X-Men” audition. (When he was tapped for a callback, Mr. Jackman said, “They were like, ‘O.K., lose the perm and the Southern cowboy accent.’ It was the only American accent I could do at the time.”)

Only after Dougray Scott had been hired to play Logan — and then dropped out over a scheduling conflict with “Mission: Impossible 2” — was Mr. Jackman brought to the “X-Men” set to screen-test, and to gawk at potential cast mates like Mr. Stewart and Ian McKellen, his acting idols.

Mr. Stewart remembered Mr. Jackman for his modesty on that visit. Following the screen test, Mr. Stewart said, “Hugh came back about 45 minutes later, and the first thing he said was, ‘Well, you guys are never going to see me again.’”

Instead, Mr. Jackman has starred in the first three “X-Men” movies, two previous “Wolverine” films and the 2014 entry, “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” (Combined worldwide gross: $2.7 billion.) He won a Tony for “The Boy From Oz” in 2004 and received a special Tony in 2012 for contributions to the Broadway community; he has hosted the Tonys four times, won an Emmy for hosting the Tonys and hosted the Academy Awards.



Aside from a brief, bloody cameo in “X-Men: Apocalypse” last year, Mr. Jackman did not necessarily see himself returning to the franchise. That changed during a publicity tour for the science-fiction film “Chappie,” whose director, Neill Blomkamp, asked if he could do only one more film in the series, what story would he tell?


“I’d had a few wines,” Mr. Jackman recalled. “I said, ‘I think I’ve only got one more film, if I do it.’ And I just blurted out something. I went home and went to sleep, and I woke up at 4 in the morning, picked up my phone, and recorded a voice memo.”

In that memo, Mr. Jackman laid out the framework for “Logan,” with a story that would take its influences from “Unforgiven,” “The Wrestler” and “Shane” (a portion of which appears in “Logan”), and tell the story of “the fallen hero, trying to escape his past, find some peace and deal with disappointment and regret,” he said.


James Mangold, who directed “Logan” and wrote the screenplay with Michael Green and Scott Frank, said the film was a natural reaction to the “exhaustion that’s setting in with the formula that’s been used for the last couple decades” of comic-book movies.

“There’s cities exploding and super evil villains flying in from the planet Yahoo,” said Mr. Mangold, who directed Mr. Jackman in “The Wolverine” in 2013 (and before that, in the 2001 romantic time-travel comedy “Kate & Leopold”). “There’s enough circus and spectacle. When you start to strip a lot of that out, you go: ‘Is this enough? Can we function on this?’”

If anything, Mr. Mangold was more sure than Mr. Jackman was that “Logan” could be his last time as the character.
“I don’t think he ever viewed it as ‘could be,’” Mr. Mangold said. “I think he approached it as, it was.”
He added: “By thinking of this as his curtain call, he arrived every day on set electric. I don’t think anyone can see this film and call it a paycheck film for him.”


Mr. Jackman said it was only a matter of time before another actor took over Wolverine. “The character will go on,” he said. “Someone else will play it, for sure.” He insisted he was at peace with that, “unless Daniel Day-Lewis plays him and wins the Oscar — then I might have a little problem.”


Mr. Stewart, who already shares the Charles Xavier role with James McAvoy (who plays the character’s younger incarnation), said that as a classically trained Shakespearean actor, he believed performers invariably developed an attachment to their best-known roles.


“Occasionally, you feel, hang on a minute — that’s my role!” he said. “Macbeth is what I played! Shylock is what I played! What are they doing?”

Beneath Mr. Jackman’s sanguine exterior, Mr. Stewart said, he probably recognized the significance of giving up the character. “I think he very much senses the weight of that,” he said. “But I have to tell you, Hugh Jackman carries that weight very lightly.”

Mr. Jackman had now spent several weeks in New York filming “The Greatest Showman,” his Barnum musical, which is planned for a Christmas release, and which casts him as the showboating, larger-than-life impresario who is worlds away from the inward, beaten-down Logan.

“The Greatest Showman” is not a film that Mr. Jackman specifically planned as a pivot from Wolverine. But it’s one that he spent several years helping to develop — “I probably thought there was a 50-50 chance of it being made,” he said — and seeing it take shape has made him enthusiastic about what a possible post-X-Men future might look like for him.

“I’m a little addicted to movies feeling personal, if not life or death, so that there’s really something at stake, and win or lose, it feels right,” he said.

And when “The Greatest Showman” is done, Mr. Jackman said, his schedule will be clear. “I’m actually freer than I’ve ever been,” he said. “I don’t have anything actually planned for after this movie, which is really exciting for me.”

He laughed and then added: “That may be naïveté. Like: ‘Dude, there’s a reason.’”

[jo]

Lol - the loss of his chance for an Oscar must still rankle slightly, even if he refers to DDL in jest


But this one is really interesting --

Aside from a brief, bloody cameo in “X-Men: Apocalypse” last year, Mr. Jackman did not necessarily see himself returning to the franchise. That changed during a publicity tour for the science-fiction film “Chappie,” whose director, Neill Blomkamp, asked if he could do only one more film in the series, what story would he tell?

“I’d had a few wines,” Mr. Jackman recalled. “I said, ‘I think I’ve only got one more film, if I do it.’ And I just blurted out something. I went home and went to sleep, and I woke up at 4 in the morning, picked up my phone, and recorded a voice memo.”

In that memo, Mr. Jackman laid out the framework for “Logan,” with a story that would take its influences from “Unforgiven,” “The Wrestler” and “Shane” (a portion of which appears in “Logan”), and tell the story of “the fallen hero, trying to escape his past, find some peace and deal with disappointment and regret,” he said.

I thought the idea of LOGAN was all of Mangold's creative vision ( he gets official credit for the STORY and SCREENPLAY). Hugh is a journalism graduate ( we know that he once tried to write a Bill Bixby script, but left It unfinished) and we know his commitment to the Wolverine role over the years, so this is not something that is surprising. He must have put together a creative framework on the kind of last Wolverine movie that he wanted to portray and discussed it with Mangold. Mangold probably developed it more fully and then co-wrote the screenplay.


Re any new projects --

Mr. Jackman -- after a long break ( to take care of all health and stress issues) -- please let us know what the new creative project you might be involved in will be! We wait with bated breath because we are looking forward to the next phase of your career! Bonne chance!


Jo

[jo]

The article makes it as one of the top features of the online edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES --

www.nytimes.com/

[jo]

ComingSoon.net writes its own retrospective on Hugh Jackman as Wolverine over the years --

www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/809427-logan-wolverine-movies#/slide/1