The animal kingdom! It’s so vast! So wild! But occasionally domesticated! Mostly, though, it’s all over the place and there’s so much of it! How is any one person going to know what each little thing is? You can’t! But you can try to learn bit by bit, animal by animal.
And you can keep telling the story of how you came to this knowledge, like Jane Goodall or Hugh Jackman, to remind us that the quest for truth is noble and good and useful, especially when you’re playing in a movie where your character is based on a specific animal that you didn’t know existed.
Jackman was hired to play the character Wolverine in a movie about mutants called X-Men. His mutation, and therefore superpower, was that he could quickly heal from almost any wound, much like wolverines. Just kidding. Wolverines look like small bears but are actually very large weasels, and their wounds pretty much stay wounds for the normal amount of time. Honestly, wolverines and the character Wolverine have little in common save for the claws and a lot of strength relative to their size. Also, I suppose, they’re both pretty cute.
Anyway, Jackman didn’t know wolverines were real things. He thought it was a play on “wolf.” According to Page Six, Jackman said at a panel, “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.”
While on the set of 2000’s X-Men, director Bryan Singer noticed something was not right: “He said, ‘Are you sort of walking funny, what’s going on?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been doing this thing with wolves,’ and he goes, ‘You know you’re not a wolf, right?‘”
“I said, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as a wolverine,‘” Jackman said, erroneously. He was instructed to “go to the zoo, dude.”
He went on to play Wolverine eight more times. Jackman has told this story before over the years. He told MTV back in 2013. Why would he tell it again? For jokes? For laughs? Sure. But also so we might take heart. The truth is out there and it can keep you from looking like a dumb-dumb on film sets. Also, there’s humor in the quest for truth. Also, wolverines are not wolves, but they are real. Seems like Jackman’s job is done here.
