It's been nearly a decade since Hugh Jackman burst onto the big screen baring his claws in Brian Singer's X-Men.
Now the international star is going back to the beginning to appear in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Having played the character on and off for the past nine years, have things got any easier for the actor?
"I don't like ease. If something is too easy it makes me a little nervous. I feel like it should be a little challenging a little frightening and a little and a little difficult otherwise I feel the audience can feel it's a bit of a doddle a bit of a walk in the park. And for this was probably the most challenging of them all. The first movie I'll admit I was, it was my first American movie and it was this massive thing and I was like 'what the hell is going on' for about a month it was huge. And no one called me by my name, people we're talking to me, if they did they'd say Mr Jackman and keep their eyes down, I was like what the hell is going on here so it took me a while to get in to it. But this movie I got to really fill in who he was and his past and they didn't give me much rest."
There's plenty of action and fight sequences to keep the fans happy, but as Jackman explains he had to stick to a strict diet in order to look the part or half man and half beast:
"I always had this image of the character being physically more animalistic because he's a guy who's half animal and half human he's battling every day of his life. He's never at peace right. A part of him just wants to break free you know, do what he wants to do and the other half is trying to connect and be human and controlled. I wanted to physically for him to have that animalistic look I wanted veins I wanted muscles that look like a horse that's just been galloping. That kind of feeling of power and danger. In order to do that without visual effects budget helping him at all, I had to eat a lot of chicken, steamed chicken. And I apologise to the chicken community and fish and vegetables and salad and not a lot of fun stuff."
As the story delves into the mystical past of Wolverine, director Gavin Hood hopes to engage the audience on more of an emotional level with Wolverine's character.
"You go as somebody extracting the pieces that you feel are most powerful for you. I certainly went with the idea that whatever makes this story more emotionally engaging is what I want to take and the idea of them being half brothers just gives emotional fuel to their relationship. They are the protagonist and the antagonist and you package that kind of emotional relationship with good action and good spectacle and I hope we have a movie that fans will enjoy both from and action and spectacle point of view and from a character driven point of view."
X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens in New Zealand 30 April 2009.
APTN