Hugh Jackman Didn't Realize Wolverines Were Actual Animals Until After He Was Cast as Wolverine in X-MEN

Here's a fun story. Hugh Jackman, whose most famous role is Wolverine from the X-Men films, apparently didn't learn that wolverines were real creatures until after he was cast and started filming the first X-Men in the late '90s.

“I didn’t even know there was a wolverine,” said Jackman at a press event earlier this week, according to Page Six. “I literally, embarrassingly did about two weeks of research on wolves. I was rehearsing for three weeks and I was shooting, so I was kind of on my own. I remember going past an IMAX in Toronto, and there was an IMAX documentary about wolves, and so I thought, ‘I’ll go and see that.’”

When he arrived on the set and began filming, Jackman adopted the characteristics of a wolf...until director Bryan Singer set him straight.

“He said, ‘Are you sort of walking funny, what’s going on?’” Jackman said. “And I said, ‘I’ve been doing this thing with wolves,’ and he goes, ‘You know you’re not a wolf, right?’” 

But even when Singer told him the truth about his character's origins, Jackman still didn't believe it:

“I said, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as a wolverine,’” Jackman said. “[Singer said] ‘Go to the zoo, dude.’ I literally didn’t know it existed.”

As io9 points out, this isn't that crazy considering Jackman hails from Australia, where there aren't any wolverines. It's an easy mistake to make: the character's heightened sense of smell and claws could definitely be confused for being based on a wolf's powers if you hadn't ever heard of a wolverine before. Still...there were search engines in the late '90s, and a quick search may have saved Jackman a lot of time and effort. At least he has a sense of humor about it.