'Logan' Stars Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart on the Violence, R-Rating, and Professor X's 'Potty Mouth'
After last year’s Deadpool made the world safe for R-rated comic book movies, Logan is poised to start a whole new conversation about how dark and violent audiences want their superheroes to be. The final chapter in Hugh Jackman’s 17-year journey as Wolverine finds everyone’s favorite adamantium-enhanced mutant embarking on one last adventure through a dystopian future — one that requires him to bloody his claws much more than he has in the past.
The movie, which premieres on Friday, offers a grim, intensely violent story that more than earns its R rating. Yahoo Movies recently talked to stars Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart and director James Mangold about the characters’ descent into darkness. (Watch the Jackman and Stewart clip above.) “There was a fight about the rating at some point,” Jackman said. “We really wanted to make a movie about men who had been heroes, and had battled for many years, and what is life like after that? The reality is that it is grim, it is dark, it is gritty. In the end, the rating became clear, but we didn’t know what it was going to be [in the beginning]. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be [rated] G!”
Related: Ian McKellen Jokes About Not Joining His X-Men Buddies in ‘Logan’
Stewart, who reprises his role as Professor Charles Xavier, said that an early concern about the blunt force of the film’s violence was related the fact that one of the main characters in Logan is a child. Dafne Keen plays Laura, a young mutant with her own flair for bloodshed, who comes under Logan’s reluctant protection and learns that there’s more to life than killing. “We see her change in the movie,” he said. “So I think it completely justifies that decision.”
Logan director James Mangold credits the critical and commercial success of the more cartoonishly ultraviolent Deadpool with making a grimmer Wolverine movie possible. “[It] definitely made the studio feel more confident in letting us continue on the path we were on,” the filmmaker told Yahoo Movies senior editor Kevin Polowy. (Watch their interview below.) “I think we’re making a movie that’s first and foremost an adult film about these characters. In that sense, the violence is more intense and the language is a little more salty.”
He’s not kidding about the salty language; perhaps even more shocking than seeing Logan drive his claws into bad guys’ brains is hearing Professor X drop F-bombs. “Charles has always been considered cultivated and low-key in his language,” said Stewart. “So to suddenly find that he has a potty mouth is a wonderful way of indicating that things ain’t what they used to be!”
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