Co-star Patrick Stewart talks about the future of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in ‘Logan’
M ost fans have heard that “Logan,” Fox’s third spinoff movie featuring Wolverine, is supposedly Hugh Jackman’s final appearance as the most popular X-Man of all.
But what about Professor X, the wheelchair-bound leader of the mutant hero group who has long been a father figure to the semi-immortal, rage-fueled slasher? That other series stalwart, Patrick Stewart, who’s played the older version of the powerful telepath in six previous movies, is the only major franchise mainstay to share the screen with Jackman in “Logan.”
And much as this second R-rated, ultrabrutal X movie (“Deadpool,” though kind of its own thing, counts as the first R of Fox’s Marvel mutant properties) feels like a Wolverine sendoff, Professor Xavier’s fate seems decided in it as well.
But don’t be so sure about that, Stewart cautions.
“I cannot say,” the 76-year-old English Shakespearean says of whether we’ll see him as Charles again. “It’s entirely out of my control. It lies in the hands of Marvel and Fox. And you will understand, I have already been vaporized three movies ago! I mean, Jean Grey, she just fragmented me. I’ve got to tell you, that was an uncomfortable experience. But here I am, still upright, speaking full sentences and apparently not vaporized at all.”
Well, not entirely the case, at least at the start of “Logan,” which takes its name from Wolverine’s alter ego. The film, directed by “The Wolverine’s” James Mangold, is set in 2029, after most mutants have apparently died and new ones haven’t emerged for a decade. Logan long ago chucked the costume and is working on the down-low as a limousine driver in El Paso, Texas. It’s taking a lot longer for his body to heal from wounds these days, and those adamantium claws aren’t popping out with the alacrity that they used to.
That’s nothing, though, compared to what’s happened to the aged Xavier. Suffering from brain seizures and intermittent dementia, he’s losing control of his formidable psychic powers and has become a threat to mere homo sapiens. Logan keeps the professor at a remote, abandoned smelter in the Mexican desert and tries to bring his mentor enough medicine to keep him harmless and lucid.
“I realized that there was something quite unexpected going on in this movie,” Stewart says, about his first reading of the “Logan” script. “It was so bizarre and unexpected and inexplicable that I was immediately grabbed. For me, over the years, diversity and contrast has always been high on my list of why I would want to do a piece of work as opposed to anything else. And I very quickly realized that this Charles Xavier was not completely the Charles Xavier of the other movies.
“And I liked what I was reading very much,” adds Stewart, who started in repertory theater and still hits the stage regularly (often, lately, opposite X movies co-star Ian McKellan), and whose television work ranges from the recent comedy “Blunt Talk” to Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to a galaxy of cartoon voices and “The Lion in Winter’s” King Henry II.
“Especially the wacky nature of Charles’ language, one could say the obscenity of his language, which was not something you would expect to have heard from that smooth, cool intellectual we’d seen sitting in his wheelchair over the years.”
Soon, Logan finds himself also in charge of a little Mexican girl, Laura (movie newcomer Dafne Keen). She doesn’t talk and has a ferociousness reminiscent of his own, not to mention her own adamantium extensions. She’s being chased by some really bad paramilitary types and wants to go to North Dakota. Xavier intuits that if this powerful creature isn’t exactly a mutant, she’s something he and the reluctant Logan must protect as they would any other X-child.
So the three of them hit the road.
“I was happy to spend so much time with Hugh, who over the years has become a good friend and a much-admired colleague,” Stewart notes. “And it was intriguing to share this very grown-up relationship with a child. Perhaps the biggest challenge was understanding and embracing the fact that the familial aspect of all this had been turned right around. From the very beginning, Xavier had a protective feeling about Logan. He brought him into the X-Men and tried in every way to settle him down, take care of him and advise him, not always successfully.
“But now, we see that the parent is Logan. Charles would not survive if it were not for Logan. So the roles are reversed — for a while. As the movie progresses and Charles gets a little more control over his behavior, we see
that the essential father figure that Charles had been is still there. He is still trying to help Logan find the least self-destructive way through his life. And when Laura appears on the scene, Charles now has another individual to care for.”
Despite the little girl’s feral nature and the movie’s
spasms of bloody violence, the trio had a pretty good time filming last June along the roads of Louisiana. Uncomfortable, but good.
“Dafne was a committed, brave child who was willing to just let everything go in creating the life of this creature,” Stewart reveals. “Then I discovered she was also adorable and funny and smart and fabulously bilingual. [Keen is the daughter of English and Spanish actors.] Hugh and
she and I became a little compact unit in the movie, particularly in the last two or three weeks that I was working. We spent those weeks in a car that had minimum air conditioning during a hot summer – and I’ve got to tell you that air conditioning didn’t reach the back seat! I looked like I was in pain? There was no acting involved there.
“We spent hours sharing the discomfort, but Hugh was very good at inventing games. He invented word games for us to play during the long periods while we were waiting for the camera to roll. The three of us had so much fun that, I think, at times James felt he had to intervene and bring us back on course.”
That diversity thing Stewart loves so much will be evident in his upcoming features: “Wilde Wedding,” a rare romantic comedy for the actor; and the animated “Emoji Movie,” in which the distinguished thespian lends his stentorian voice to the online icon for Poop — much, he reports, to his grandchildren’s delight.
Longtime political activist Stewart also plans to become an American citizen soon, having married one, Sunny Ozell, in 2013, and with the belief that he can better address what he believes are the nation’s urgent troubles that way. And in the meantime, he can smile at each new internet meme that keeps popping up of Picard with his head in his hand, reacting to the culture’s latest outrages.
But another X movie? Well, even Jackman has recently hinted that, if the mutants ever leave Fox for Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’d consider Wolverining again.
“So who can tell?” Stewart figures. “In a world of superheroes and studio franchises, nothing can be said to be forever.”