Hugh Jackman has had to do a lot of stunts in his career, especially when playing the very physical anti-hero Wolverine. But there was one incident where Jackman thought his stunt almost caused him serious injury.
Hugh Jackman is used to getting injured doing ‘X-Men’ stunts
Given that the X-Men films are so action-packed, it’s no wonder why Jackman often does his own stunts. But the actor once reminded that doing stunts for these movies often come with a certain amount of physical risk.
In the past, the Deadpool 3 star sustained his fair share of bruises doing stunts. But for The Wolverine and X-Men Days of Future Past, Jackman had far less injuries than he did in previous X-Men films. Despite being older.
“I do a lot of my own stuff, except the stupid stuff like bashing your head against walls or crashing cars and all that jazz. But I did it the right way. I had a good amount of time to prepare, so I built slowly, I hit The Wolverine and this movie without any injuries, which is was the first time – every time I’ve played Wolverine before I’ve carried some kind of injury because I’ve had to race to get ready. I did it slowly, I felt great, I felt great throughout,” Jackman once told Collider.
Still, that didn’t mean the actor had it too easy when it came to putting his body on the line.
“I felt tired, obviously, and it is harder, I’ll admit that, but I felt really good. Physically for me, I feel better now probably than I did in the earlier films. So that’s not an issue for me. Yet. It’s all the meat pies! You guys saw the Wolverine diet,” he added.
Hugh Jackman’s wife once yelled at him for almost breaking his neck in a Wolverine stunt
Although Jackman had a better handle on stunts during The Wolverine, there was one sequence that caused him a big scare. The scene in question involved Jackman’s Wolverine and a moving train.
“In the film, there is a scene where I swing from the inside to the outside of a train and my neck got caught,” Jackman once told TNT. “I thought I had broken it!”
The dangerous scene was one that the film’s director James Mangold had in mind for a while. Mangold felt it was a fresh twist on the action genre.
“It is a well-worn action movie trope to have [people] fighting on the top of a train,” Mangold said. “[But] never has it happened on top of a bullet train. You’re going 290-odd mph, as fast as a plane, and there are trains coming the other way only eight inches apart from each other which make a sonic boom as they pass – they are insane!”
However, Jackman’s wife Deborra Lee-Furness didn’t mince words when it came to her feelings about Jackman’s stunt.
“It was one of those moments when my wife looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing? Enough playing in the schoolyard! You are not invincible,’” Jackman recalled Lee-Furness telling him.
Hugh Jackman once shared the film that treated him like an ‘old man’ when it came to stunts
The X-Men films weren’t the only movies Jackman starred in requiring a large degree of stunts. In 2015 Jackman starred in the feature Chappie. The sci-fi movie was about Jackman bonding with a robot in a future where droids have become commonplace in society.
In the film, his character would often be involved in situations that required physical stunts. But unlike the X-Men movies, those involved in Chappie didn’t want their lead becoming too physical.
“When I’m as Wolverine on those sets, the stunt guys who I’ve known forever, I just end up doing most of them. Probably because I’ve always done them,” he once said in an interview with Global Grind. “So I’m walking on the set and it’s interesting because they were like, we’ll get the stunt men to do this. They were treating me like an old man. When I saw some of the things that had to be done I was like fine, you can crash through the ceiling.”
