Hugh Jackman Was Yelled at for Being Too Nice While Playing Wolverine
Hugh Jackman has become synonymous with Wolverine after playing the character for so many years. But initially, it took some work for Jackman to nail the character’s rough edges because of his inherent kindness.
Hugh Jackman’s niceness worried the ‘X-Men’ crew
Jackman is seen as one of Hollywood’s nicest actors. It appears he was the same way when starting out. However, there were times when he was told that his kindness might actually work against him. He was warned about this as far back as his drama school days by one of his classmates.
“I remember on the last day of drama school, this girl came up to me; we were at a party, it was about 2 in the morning, and she was really drunk, and we had been at drama school for years together, and she came up, and she goes, ‘I’m going to tell you the truth,’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You’re too nice. You’ll never ever get anywhere because you’re too nice,'” he recalled, according to Yahoo.
Jackman shrugged off the remarks at the time. He felt that his kindness had no bearing on his ability to act or his chances of success.
“I remember at the time thinking that is ridiculous. Surely, we’re actors. What matters is what I do in front of the camera or when I’m on stage…I love what I do, and I’m guided by the way I was brought up, which is just, ‘Be respectful.’ That’s all that drives me,” he said.
But it turns out his kind attitude did cause some worry after he was cast as Wolverine. Wolverine is normally depicted as mean-spirited and bitter. Screenwriter David Hayter quipped that Jackman wouldn’t be able to capture any of those traits.
“And actually, I said to Bryan one day, ‘We’re going to have the nicest Wolverine in film history.’ And it was a bit of a concern. Hugh is just a love. He is so sweet,” Hayter once told The Hollywood Reporter.
This resulted in the film’s director, Bryan Singer, yelling at Jackman to get him into Wolverine mode.
“Bryan, he yelled at Hugh one day and was like, ‘You need to be edgier. You need to be meaner; you need to be tougher. You need to go home and get into a fight with your wife. Have a screaming match with your wife!’ And Hugh said, ‘Bryan, if I went home and got in a fight like that with Deb, I’d come in crying!’ We were like, ‘Oh no, we’re all dead,'” Hayter said.
Why Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine became the focal point of the ‘X-Men’ movies
In the end, it seemed Singer and Hayter had little to worry about. Jackman ended up being the perfect choice for Wolverine, which Hayter and company discovered early on.
“We wrote him very tough. Very edgy, and then Hugh brought his humanity to it. In the end, there’s a core of steel there he brought to it that made it into a full person. Wolverine could be a caricature. He could be a growling asshole, really. I think it was the balance,” Hayter said.
Jackman was such a good match for the character, in fact, that he ended up becoming the face of many of the X-Men movies. In the comics and other media, Wolverine isn’t always the focus of the X-Men series. But Hayter made a deliberate decision early on to make Wolverine the center because of the character’s depth.
“He is the fulcrum of X-Men. The earlier X-Men group was a brilliant creation of Stan Lee’s, but when Len Wein created Wolverine, and they brought him into the X-Men, it was the perfect fulcrum between Professor X’s philosophy and Magneto’s philosophy,” Hayter said. “The fact that he wasn’t bound by either gave him such a wild, attractive freedom that it was obvious that was the character the series needed to revolve around.”
