The MCU’s X-Men Reboot Already Has The Perfect Wolverine In This The Bear Actor

Marvel Studios walked onto the D23 stage in August and named seven X-Men. Sadie Sink is Jean Grey. Kit Connor is Cyclops. Christopher Abbott is Professor Charles Xavier, Samara Weaving is Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette is Rogue, Maya Boyd is Storm, and Adam Driver is Nathaniel Milbury, the geneticist better known to fans as Mister Sinister. Jake Schreier directs, the film lands May 5, 2028, and the single most valuable character in the franchise was not mentioned once. Wolverine was notably absent from the D23 festivities. In fact, there’s not been much in the way of mention about where Marvel wants to go with Wolverine or any indication of who they might want to pick up the role. This leaves the most interesting casting question in superhero movies wide open, and there is one actor whose entire body of work is a five-season argument that he should get the call. His name is Jeremy Allen White, and the case for him starts with something Marvel has already done.

The argument is not that Jeremy Allen White looks the part, although the internet settled that question the first time gym photos from The Bear circulated. It is that Marvel has already hired the writers who know how to build this character, and they built him once already under a different name. The reboot’s screenplay comes from the room that made The Bear‘s Carmen Berzatto, a man who is best at the thing that is destroying him, who cannot stay in a room with his own family, and who says almost nothing that is not about work.

Take the kitchen out and you have a character that is eerily similar to Logan. Add a physical transformation the actor has already completed on camera, a public comment he made about a superhero audition that went nowhere, a competition list far shorter than fan casting suggests, and a real argument against him that deserves to be heard, and this stops being a wish and starts being a case. Here is the whole of it, including the part that cuts the other way.

The X-Men Movie Is Already Being Written By The Person Who Built Carmy Berzatto

The reboot’s screenplay is credited to Lee Sung Jin, the creator of Beef, and Joanna Calo, the writer and co-showrunner of The Bear. Schreier has previously confirmed Jun and Calo’s work on the screenplay – a genuinely strange hire for a superhero tentpole and a very deliberate one. Calo spent five seasons building Carmen Berzatto, a man whose defining trait is rage he cannot discharge, wrapped around grief he refuses to name, expressed almost entirely through work he is too good at to walk away from, a character not unlike Logan.

Given the complex character work and building that Calo did with The Bear, it feels like a safe bet that the X-Men reboot is going to focus much more on the characters rather than simply overall spectacle. With that in mind and given Wolverine’s deeply internalized grief and rage, the film would need to look for an actor with a very specific range to carry the role. It’s a specific range we already know that White has which would arguably make him a perfect fit for what is, largely, a superhero version of his most well-known character to date.

White Has Already Proven He Can Build The Body And Carry The Damage

White’s fit as Wolverine goes well beyond proven character work, however. The actor has already proven he can look the part as well. The standard objection to casting a wiry television actor as Wolverine is that he cannot physically become the character. White proved that objection wrong in 2023. To play the wrestler Kerry Von Erich in The Iron Claw, he gained forty pounds of muscle, telling Entertainment Tonight at the time he was “eating a lot, like, a pretty tremendous amount” and lifting weights with no cardio at all.

The result was not just size. Von Erich is a man built like a slab who is disintegrating from the inside, which is a harder assignment than looking good with his shirt off, and TheWrap’s review placed White in what it called the Michael Corleone role, the brother who gets out and gets pulled back anyway. When you add White’s ability to physically transform to his ability to play characters with deep internal pain, you get an actor that almost feels tailor-made to take on Wolverine.

What Jeremy Allen White Has Actually Said About Marvel Is The Most Wolverine Thing In His Career

Here is where the argument has to be honest, because the internet is bad at this distinction. No trade has reported White for Wolverine. Marvel has also said nothing, no scooper has attached his name, and he has never been described as a candidate by anyone with actual sourcing. This is fan-casting and it should be read that way. What is real is what he has said out loud. In 2023, White had suggested he was up for a Marvel-like role but tanked the audition on purpose; though, he’s since softened on the idea of appearing in more commercial films.

More recently, he’s had to answer questions about Wolverine, specifically, and his response was gracious and noncommittal, deflecting a bit by opting to praise Hugh Jackman’s work in the role rather than express any actual interest for himself. While this might not actually mean anything, it’s also a bit interesting how Wolverine-like his actual responses to superhero fare is. A man who sneered at the biggest opportunity in the industry, blew it deliberately, and then admitted in public that he had been protecting his own ego is not just playing the character. That is the character.

The Case Against Him Is Real, And So Is The Competition

However, even with White seeming like a perfect fit for the role, there are still plenty objections people have to him being cast in the role. Start with the objection that is not actually an objection. White is listed at around 5-foot-7, which sounds disqualifying until you remember that the Wolverine of the comics is officially 5-foot-3 and Hugh Jackman is 6-foot-2. Twenty-four years of Jackman have trained audiences to expect a giant, but on paper White is more accurate build by a wide margin, though it might be hard to reconcile the difference visually.

The genuine problem is White’s ability to perform itself. White’s rage is implosive. Carmy’s anger collapses inward into panic and self-sabotage, and Wolverine’s detonates outward into other people. Nothing in his filmography shows him credibly menacing anyone, he has never carried an action film, and he has never done sustained fight work. It is also worth saying that this site has published two separate lists of ideal Wolverine recasts and he was not on either one. Meanwhile the only name with any reporting attached, thin as it is, belongs to Dafne Keen, whose return as Laura has been floated by scoopers as a possible route to an MCU Wolverine. Matt Wood’s name has also come up – as someone who is the same height and has made the same offer to get in shape, while noting that there are not really even rumors yet. Marvel also cast this ensemble young and relatively unproven, which a two-time Emmy winner in his mid-thirties does not obviously fit.

Ultimately, we’re just fan casting here. The fate of Wolverine is still up in the air. Hugh Jackman has been careful not to shut the door, leaning into Ryan Reynolds’ suggestion that Marvel will make Hugh do the role until he’s 90 – while adding that he hopes his eventual replacement will make it their own. That is the assignment. Not an impression of Jackman, and not a smaller version of him either. Somebody who can carry a man who has outlived everyone he loved and turned that into a weapon, in a movie written by the person who spent five years doing exactly that in a kitchen in Chicago. The role is open, the script is in unusually interesting hands, and we’re all curious to see what happens when the order’s up.

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