Hugh Jackman recently stepped out for a workout on Thursday (January 27) after the snowstorm in New York City. The 42-year-old Aussie actor is working hard to pack on the muscle for his upcoming reprisal of his Wolverine character, and it was recently announced that he’d be presenting at the 2011 Oscars.
He’s excited to be working with Darren Aronofsky for this comic book flick, which is looking to be one of the darkest and innovative with the visionary director behind the camera.
His previous ‘Origins’ flick failed to flesh out the source material and offered a conventional back-story that their hoping to set right with this new film.
Jackman is looking forward to the new project and indicates that McQuarrie’s screenplay will capture the true survivalist mentality and conflicted morality of Wolverine, something he’s been hoping to see as far back as Bryan Singer‘s ‘X-Men’.
He recently spoke with Hero complex and discussed how the new character will be closer to the original comics and that bulking up will be a large part of the transformation
Asked whether the new movie would bear any resemblance to Marvel’s 1982 ”Wolverine” by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, which he’s always hoped would be incorporated in some way:
Wolverine by Claremont & Miller
I’m really, really pumped about it. I feel like all the planets are finally aligned to make a great movie. We finally have the character and with this mythology — ever since [the 2000 Bryan Singer film] “X-Men,” when I was kind of hanging around and reading all these comics, because I was cast before I ever read any X-Men comics, so I was trying to get my hands on everything. I remember saying to [producer] Lauren Shuler Donner, “Lauren, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen this Japanese story, and I think it’s so good. It’s just genius, it’s brilliant.” And we kind of always talked about it from there on. I sort of even wanted to do that in the third X-Men movie at first, but we thought, no, we really need to establish who he is at first, and we did that [with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”], and now this is sort of the cherry on top, to finally do it and have Darren Aronofsky direct it.
I love his gung-ho attitude toward it and great vision. Straight off, it’s not a sequel, it’s a stand-alone, and I think we’re going to make one that people will describe as the best of the bunch.
As for the script by Christopher McQuarrie who wrote ‘The Usual Suspects’, how high are his expectations for the new story?:
Chris McQuarrie has done a script that is just phenomenal. I read a story once that said that he wrote “The Usual Suspects” in 15 days, and with this one he said to me, “I just knew what I wanted, and it came out real easy.” And he’s done an unbelievable job with it, and with Darren it’s just really exciting. I’m as excited as anybody to see what we come up with. I know we’re going to be met with huge expectations. The expectations will be high, but he’s one of the great filmmakers out there. I worked with him before [on “The Fountain”], and I knew as soon as I met him that he should be doing movies like this. He’s been looking a long time, and I’ve asked him to do other ones, and this time it worked out. I’m beyond thrilled.
He was asked about his ‘whole chickens’ diet to add muscle to his current weight.
I’m on it right now, mate, already doing it. It’s 6,000 calories a day, it’s rough. Right now, I’m at 210.
Jackman is aiming to look bigger than he was on the previous Wolverine, is this part of the new vision?:
Yeah, right, I was 190, something like that. I don’t know how much I want to give away about it, but Darren said with the last one, ‘Hey you looked great, but you’re so tall that in those long shots you looked kind of like Clint Eastwood, and that’s not Wolverine.” He said that Wolverine, in the comics, is powerful, stocky, you know, he’s short and thick. So he said, ‘I want you to go there, get bigger.’ He’s going to come down after he gets done with all the black-tie events over and done with.
Finally comparing his character to the comic, Wolverine is quite short and almost hunched over at times, is this what he’s aiming for, bulky like the nasty bulldog of superheroes?
Yeah, he’s thick and it’s chunky and it’s powerful. I always think of Mike Tyson when he first came on the scene. Sometimes, he was a full foot shorter than his opponents and bent over [with this] massive build. There’s real power. You said bulldog, and that’s it exactly. Exactly. That’s what I’m going for, and if I have a massive heart attack first, well, you tell everyone what I was going for.
Darren Aronofsky’s Wolverine is sounding like it will give fans the raw energy that this character deserves. With his success of Black Swan, the filmmaker will have more creative freedom and it will be interesting to see his unique perspective of Wolverine brought to the screen with the truth it deserves.
Look for The Wolverine to claw it’s way onto screens in the summer of 2012.
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