Hugh Jackman is hanging up his Wolverine claws for good

As Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine for the final time in 'Logan', he tells Tim Robey how the role helps him manage his anger

It's easy to feel as though there are two Hugh Jackmans. Off-screen, he is clubbable, debonair, the kind of person you'd expect to routinely help old ladies across the street. He hosted the Oscars in 2009 with dance routines polished to a sheen, and a song in his heart - barely a trace of Ricky Gervais-style cynicism.

Then there's the Jackman on our cinema screens, who's much more likely to howl vengefully in your face or claw a limb off. Jean Valjean, from Les Misérables, and Logan, his feral, furious Wolverine character from the X-Men franchise, are both brooding, tortured characters.

There was also Keller Dover, the ruthless father who took the law into his own hands to locate his missing daughter in Denis Villeneuve's 2013 film Prisoners - a career peak, performance-wise. It's a disparity of which the 48-year-old Aussie is fully aware.

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"Yeah, what is that about?" he wonders, sitting back in a London hotel armchair. "Maybe I'm just, like, bored of myself, or it's more interesting to play something else. I know all of us put on a mask to the world, and I'm aware my mask is probably more convivial and nicer than I probably feel all the time.

So maybe I'm making up for that a little bit. It's great therapy. It's interesting to think what I'll do for the next 17 years, because every two or three years I've had a chance to really yell and scream, and rant and rave, and get paid for it."

Jackman has now played Logan nine times since he came snarling and bounding on to our screens in 2000, in the first X-Men film. The ninth outing is simply called Logan, and it is to be his last: those adamantium claws will be put away for good.

The role has been good to Jackman, if not necessarily good for him. He's had to get in fearsome shape on each occasion, bulking up muscle mass and doing untold gym hours. He got mercury poisoning once from the sheer amount of tinned tuna he was eating, and says he's been worried about his health ever since, especially the strain that these drastic regimes put on the immune system.

In part because of Jackman's grizzled appearance - he sports a close-to-Mel-Gibson-level greying beard through much of the film - and in part because of the film's dusty setting in the woebegone Mexican desert, Logan feels very different from earlier X-Men films, or the two previous, rather unsatisfactory Wolverine spin-offs. It's far darker and more violent: more akin to a Peckinpah Western than a conventional superhero flick. This was all part of the idea, as far as Jackman was concerned.

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"I'm more involved in this movie than before," he says. "Don't get me wrong, I wasn't the filmmaker - it is a film by James Mangold, he wrote it, directed it - but I did have a very clear idea of the type of tone from the beginning, rang Jim, and he was on board. Fully expecting the studio to say no, but they didn't."

Why take it in such a harsh direction for this last hurrah? "My summation of the business right now is that average fails. You used to be able, if you had a marketing machine, to get your first weekend, and get your money back. You could make an average film, and you were OK. I don't think that works any more.

That's why there are so many spectacular flops. By 7pm on a Friday night, the whole world knows if something is below expectations. You've got to make something that's different, that's fresh, that's new, and that is good, or you're dead."

Jackman has clearly learnt his way around the business pretty well in the last 17 years. Prior to X-Men, he was best-known as a song-and-dance guy on stage - in fact, he was playing the singing cowboy Curly in London, in a Royal National Theatre production of Oklahoma!, when the fateful callback happened.

He wasn't the first man cast as Wolverine - that was Scottish actor Dougray Scott, whose schedule on Mission: Impossible 2 overran, which made it impossible for him to honour the X-Men commitment. In stepped Jackman for the audition that changed everything. "Lose the perm," was the first instruction he got. And against the initial advice of his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness - a fellow Aussie actor 13 years his senior - he signed on for what would prove to be the first truly successful comic-book blockbuster of the present era.

Does he ever wonder how his career would have panned out without X-Men falling into his lap?

"I probably would have done more theatre," he says. "Hopefully I'd have been able to pay the rent! But certainly, there was a lot of luck. Timing, and the way it came about. I've heard not only that Dougray Scott was going to do the part, I know Russell Crowe was offered it, and turned it down, and thankfully mentioned me to the director."

The ever-durable appeal of everyone's favourite reluctant superhero has sometimes felt like a safety net for Jackman's career and star profile while he pursues a range of other options as a leading man. He won a Golden Globe nomination for his role opposite Meg Ryan in the 2001 time-travel romcom Kate & Leopold and has also had leading roles in films by Woody Allen (Scoop), Christopher Nolan (The Prestige) and Baz Luhrmann (Australia). And, of course, he got to dust off those pipes for his Oscar-nominated role as Valjean.

WATCH the trailer for Logan

Jackman believes he is more tolerant and patient than he used to be, perhaps because these outlets for "stuff that is more buried within" have helped him understand himself.

"Everyone on the planet should do six months of drama school," he says. It's helped him develop a specific philosophy of acting - Jackman, it turns out, has ready-to-share philosophies on heaps of things. "Everything is possible: there is not an emotion that you can't tap. When you see a six-month-old baby, they can go from literal rage to crying to laughter. It seems to me we forget about acting as we build our own mask."

All the arduous shoots and long promotional tours, like this one for Logan, have led to some tabloid speculation that Jackman's 20-year marriage to Furness, whom he met when they co-starred on Australian TV back in 1995, might be less devoted than it once was. Jackman insists, though, that it's stronger than ever. How have they weathered all this?

"I am married to an amazing woman," he says. "Meeting the right person is 80% of it. People often say to me that marriage is work. When I hear that, I have a feeling they may not have met the right person! Or something's gone wrong, because it doesn't feel like that to me." - The Daily Telegraph, London