X-Men: Days Of Future Past's Hugh Jackman Talks Possibility Of Wolverine Dying

Wolverine is, without a doubt, the most popular X-Men character that ever was. He's retractable claws coming out of his knuckles, but his most significant mutant power is probably "not dying." In the comics, he's come back from stab wounds, gun shots, being ripped in half by the hulk, even nuclear explosions and, in one particularly trippy X-Men Annual from the 80s, the unmaking of his very being. In the comics, Wolverine kills Daken, his son who shares this same healing ability, by drowning him, suggesting that this may be a way to kill Wolverine as well. But in X-Men: Days of Future Past [mild SPOILER warning], Wolverine survives just such a drowning, suggesting that even that can't kill Wolverine, or at least his cinematic self. So is there anything that can kill Wolverine? Io9 posed that question Hugh Jackman, the man who has been playing the character in seven films over the past 15 years. "You have to feel that's possible," Jackman says. "And I think that's what Marvel is doing with the comic books. You have to feel that every character there is in danger. It's part of the problem we got into with Wolverine his kind of escalation of his ability to survive. The only way to get rid of him is to chop his head off. It was actually Chris McQuarrie who said no we have to reset that, and he did that with him becoming mortal." The comics that that Jackman is referring to is the currently ongoing Wolverine series, written by Paul Cornell, that sees Wolverine losing his healing factor. The series will culminate in the Death of Wolverine miniseries by Charles Soule and Steve McNiven this September. "But I always felt that he could die," Jackman continues. "He heals, he just heals quicker. In X2 when he's getting stabbed repeatedly by Lady Deathstrike that you felt he was going. And he was dying and that's how I was playing it. In the end that drowning thing got cut a little bit. For you and I we lie without breathing and after a minute, we're gone. For him, it's 20 minutes. But it's not that he can be there for 11 years, you feel like he needs breath at some point." So Wolverine's not impossible to kill, it just takes a little extra effort. X-Men: Days of Future Past is now playing in theaters.