Hugh Jackman is done playing Wolverine. As Logan continues to do well at the box office, it seems so weird to think that we’ve seen Jackman as the X-Man for the last time. Perhaps only Sean Connery as James Bond has so indelibly taken a popular culture character and married it to his own identity. For 17 years, Jackman embodied the character from the first time we saw him cage fighting in a bar in X-Men to his farewell in Logan. Not too shabby for a song and dance man.
X-Men was most people’s first exposure to Jackman, but his talents are far from merely dicing people in super hero films. He’s a consummate Broadway actor; an old-fashioned song and dance man, as I said. He’s hosted the Tony Awards on four occasions; winning an Emmy for one of the shows. He most famously got to put his musical gifts to use on screen as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables; Jackman’s only Oscar nomination. He’s an outstanding dramatic actor, you need only watch The Prestige and Prisoners back-to-back to see the amount of range he has. His good nature also makes him a gifted comic actor, which I think has been best shown in the underrated Real Steel and Eddie the Eagle (where, yes, he is playing Wolverine as a ski jumping coach, but it WORKS!). It’s always possible that a payday or Ryan Reynolds stalking him to be in a Deadpool or X-Force film could give us another Jackman as Logan turn, but his career is far from over just because he’s said farewell to his most famous alter ego.
