Hugh Jackman Was Nervous About Playing X-24 in ‘Logan’
One of the most impressive parts about Logan was one of its most closely guarded secrets: Hugh Jackman not only played the title character, he played his evil double too; a perfect clone of Wolverine known as X-24. This new character wasn’t featured in any of the marketing materials or even alluded to in any way. When he shows up late in the film he is a shock, and an effective extension of the movie’s themes about a man wrestling with his nature as a killer (and, possibly, a monster).
With Logan arriving on Blu-ray and digital HD (along with a swanky black-and-white cut of the film), Jackman is back on the promotional circuit talking about the movie. In an interview with Collider, he gave an interesting quote. Though X-24 was one of the coolest parts of Logan, it was one that made Jackman really nervous. In fact, he resisted the part for a long time, pushing back against director James Mangold about it. In Jackman’s words:
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.’
Jackman goes on to concede that Mangold was right about the reveal and the character. He also points out that he did some subtle physical things to differentiate X-24 from Logan (“I changed the bridge of my nose, I wore contacts”). And it does all work quite nicely. So always remember: Trust James Mangold.