Wolverine marks his first solo film franchise, but for the ragged Jackman it feels more like a finish line—very few movies have endured as many last-minute crises as Wolverine, chief among them a major act of piracy that sent a stolen copy of the film pinging around the world.

In Marvel Comics, Wolverine first appeared in 1974, the creation of Len Wein and John Romita, but many of his most intriguing shadings came a decade later with a solo print mini-series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. Jackman said he began studying the comics while filming 2000’s X-Men, despite director Bryan Singer’s ban on comics from the set to encourage a reality-based film. As a student of the history and producer of the film, he had no doubt that the crux of the film should be a struggle not between good and evil but between one man and his own rage.

Jackman moulded his body for the role, packing in calories—4,500 a day, all of them from fish, steamed chicken, tofu and the occasional steak—and then doing explosive-impact weight-lifting. The 6-foot-1 star reached 215 pounds and then came the lean-down process to reduce his body fat and start filming at 200.

“Part of you gets really into it, the extreme nature of it,” Jackman said. “I had a picture in my head of the character looking more like Robert De Niro in Cape Fear, I wanted him to be all veins and muscle. I wanted him to look dangerous.”

A new captain in Kirk’s chair

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