Hugh Jackman had a real life fighter in mind when he was first developing his Wolverine character. He thought his mutant anti-hero and iconic boxer Mike Tyson should’ve had one significant trait in common.
How Hugh Jackman wanted to model Wolverine after Mike Tyson
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Jackman had little to no knowledge of the X-Men‘s Wolverine prior to being cast as the comic character. The actor originally didn’t even think Wolverines were real, and prepared for his X-Men audition by channeling a wolf.
“Embarrassingly, I didn’t know what a wolverine was…. And I presumed it was a made-up name for the comic book,” Jackman once said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert. “I’d never read an X-Men comic. I’d never seen a wolverine… So I presumed it was a wolf.”
After acquiring the part, Jackman would get to know his Wolverine very well. In the beginning, the actor had a few ideas on how he wanted his character to fight. He used Mike Tyson’s boxing style as a frame of reference.
“I was very adamant at the beginning in 1 and 2— I used to watch tapes of Mike Tyson — and I was like, I don’t want it to be pretty. I don’t want it to be martial arts. I don’t want him to be anything other than, like, a street fighter. He doesn’t fight for the sake of fighting. If he can take someone’s head off in the first punch, he’ll take it off,” Jackman once told Entertainment Weekly.
Hugh Jackman felt Wolverine was the spine of his career<
In a 2014 interview with Collider, Jackman confided how significant the Wolverine role was to his career. It wasn’t only Jackman’s breakthrough role, but it was a character he’d find himself attached to for more than a decade. The character has also been a window for Jackman to see the growth he’s experienced as an actor over the years.
“And this character is very much the foundation, the spine of my career, so I can easily see how I’ve changed. I’d say I’m more confident- I was very much an actor based in the theatre when I got the job and I’d done some TV and film but I was more comfortable on the stage and I think that’s equaled out for me as much, I’ve been lucky enough to have a number of shots at being in films,” Jackman said.