X-MEN Icon Hugh Jackman Recalls His Final Moments Playing Wolverine In LOGAN

For eighteen years, Academy Award-nominee Hugh Jackman captivated audiences with his instantly iconic portrayal of X-Men fan-favorite Wolverine, starting his career - and effectively the entire superhero movie boom as a whole - as a relative unknown with 2000's X-Men and bringing his career and his character full circle in 2018's Logan.

In the James Mangold-directed masterstroke, Jackman bid farewell to his legendary part in epic fashion, holding his heart in his hand, and while he's certainly spoken on it in the past, he revisited that memorable final day on set during a recent conversation with former Les Misérables co-star Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises) as part of Variety's Actors on Actors issue. 

After touching how he always knew it was going to be the end of the line for him, saying, “There were so many crossovers by the end, because I’d played it for so long... I knew it was going to be my last one way before we wrote it. I made that decision. There was a weight of expectation that I’d been carrying. I was super invested.”

Jackman continues on to explain how filming his death scene was moved up unexpectedly due to bad weather, which didn't allow him to think about it much before shooting. He also further elaborates on how Mangold allowed him to fully embrace the moment during filming, even allowing him multiple takes to just fully grasp the magnitude of a scene nearly two decades in the making. 

“I was so invested. I felt so in it. I was working with a director that I worked with three times before, who I trust implicitly, Jim Mangold. I remember when we shot that scene, we were shooting very high altitude, and there were thunderstorms going off everywhere, and we had to shut down. He just said, ‘We can’t do this big stunt scene. But we’re just going to do the death scene.’ I’m like, ‘Like, now?’ He goes, ‘I’m just going to have you and Dafne, and if you could just do that.’ I’m like, ‘All right.’ He knew that’s best for me.”

“We got there and we’re shooting the scene. Dafne was 11. She was fantastic. We shot Dafne, and she turned around in two takes and he goes, ‘Let’s just kick out. Let’s do another.’ I said, ‘You sure? I feel like–‘ and he goes, ‘Man, let’s just stop the clocks. Let’s not worry about everything. This is the end of 19 years. Sit it in for half an hour'”

“He rolled the cameras. Him allowing me — not just as an actor, but as Hugh — to remember that moment. It was a luxury that I’ll never forget.”

It's an unprecedented accomplishment, the likes of which we may never see again as the overwhelming majority of superhero movie actors tend to bow out long before they even reach the decade mark. Just last year, both Marvel Cinematic Universe stars Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans said goodbye to their roles as Iron Man and Captain America in Avengers: Endgame after putting in eleven and eight years, respectively, although the latter could always be enticed to come back at some point in the future. 

In the near future, a weary Logan cares for an ailing Professor X in a hide out on the Mexican border.

But Logan's attempts to hide from the world and his legacy are up-ended when a young mutant arrives, being pursued by dark forces.