Wolverine 3: Fear The Walking Dead's Elizabeth Rodriguez's Role In Logan Revealed

01/19/2017 09:00 am EST

Logan is a piece of the X-Men movie universe but it stands completely on its own. That was made possible because director James Mangold selected a distant enough future where the events of recent films such as X-Men: Days of Future Past can have much of an effect on Logan.

"It's year 2029 when the movie takes place," Logan director James Mangold told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview.

Mangold went on to explain his reasoning in more detail -- specifically citing the post-credits scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past as the basis for his decision.

"There's an epilogue scene in Days of Future Past which is 2024, or 2023, something like that," Mangold said. "I just wanted to get far enough past. My goal was real simple: it was to pick a time where I had enough elbow room that I was clear of existing entanglements. Part of the way I think this films stop being fresh (these films being franchise comic book movies) is when you find yourself making essentially a television series with $200 million episodes where you're literally just picking up where the last one left off and you're making a mini-series. Then, it's impossible to do something fresh, meaning essentially you're just a director on the 14th episode of a television show picking up where the last one left off and people are going to be really startled by any discontinuity or changes."

This time around, Mangold hopes Logan will be self-contained and tell an entire story in its run time. It will explore uncharted emotional territories of the X-Men universe by pairing Logan with the little X-23 for a relationship which looks a lot like a father-daughter duo.

"That wasn't the goal here," Mangold said. "The goal here was to somehow make a film that's different: to be a filmmaker myself and go, 'How would I bring myself to this? What would I do if I was starting from scratch? What would I explore? What have I seen not explored?' Not only in the X-Men universe but in comic book movies in general."

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Logan hits theaters March 3, 2017.

Until now, Rodriguez's role in Logan was unknown. The actress and her character in the film were unveiled during a 20th Century Fox showcase event in New York City in December. The studio showed the first 40 minutes of the movie to a select group of press, offering up the first look Rodriguez in Logan.

Mild spoilers for the first act of Logan follow.

In Logan, Rodriguez finds Logan at a funeral early in the film. Whose funeral Logan was attending is unclear but he is watching from a distance and very much attempting to keep his presence unnoticed. Rodriguez approaches him and begs for help, realizing he is the Wolverine. It only angers him and prompts the Adamantium man to flee the area with a cuss-fueled fury in an effort to avoid attention.

Later in the film, Rodriguez and Logan cross paths again. This time, they speak to one another and Rodriguez is revealed to be a character named Gabriela. It appears that Gabriela is X-23 (or Laura Kinney)'s mother based on their situation and how Gabriela insists on getting help for the young girl. However, later in the film, Charles Xavier insists to Logan that Gabriela is not X-23's mother. Instead, he makes more of an implication that Logan might be X-23's father.

At one point, it is revealed that Gabriela has been carring an X-Men comic book with a fully costumed Wolverine on the cover while she was searching for Logan.

In Fear the Walking Dead, Rodriguez played Liza. Liza was the ex-wife of Travis and mother of Chris. Today, only Travis has survived the show's deadly storyline, with Rodriguez having bowed out late in the first season's six-episode run. Whether or not her character will meet a similar fate in Logan will be seen when Jackman's final effort as the Marvel Comics hero hits the big screen.

Logan hits theaters on March 3, 2017.

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