It's okay if someone didn't know wolverines were real animals, but for the person who got paid millions to play a wolverine in a few Marvel action films, it's pretty weird. Hugh Jackman is the man in question, since starring in X-Men, The Wolverine, and Logan. During a recent visit on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the 50-year-old admitted his truth.
"Embarrassingly, I didn’t know what a wolverine was, I’d never heard of such an animal,” he admitted, via Page Six. “I presumed it was a made up name for the comic book. I’d never read an ‘X-Men’ comic, I’d never seen a wolverine. We don’t have them in our zoos.”
Hugh assumed his character was derived from wolves, so he studied them intently for his role. "I watched some documentaries, there was a big IMAX movie at the time, I went twice to go and see it,” he added.
“I put in the hours and I turned up on set for a fight rehearsal and I was just incorporating some of that, you know, wolves always have their nose to the ground, it’s always looking through their eyes because they’re smelling you and the director goes, ‘What are you doing, man, with the body?’ I said, ‘I was doing some work on the wolves, blah, blah, blah’ and he goes, ‘Wolves? Why wolves? You’re playing a wolverine.’ I go, ‘That’s not an animal’ and he goes, ‘Yeah it is, go to the zoo.’ It was a humiliating moment and three weeks of wasted research.”