Will the real Wolverine please stand up? For 24 years, several superheroes have been recast for major motion pictures. Three people have played Spider-Man since 2002, while there have technically been five onscreen Batmans since 2005. Even Professor X and Magneto were recast in 2011 for X-Men: First Class, although, interestingly, since the year 2000, only one actor has played Wolverine onscreen: Hugh Jackman.
That is, until now. In Deadpool & Wolverine, for the very first time since the 2000 film X-Men, a live-action film has given us a different actor as Wolverine. It may seem like a small thing, but actually, the Wolverine variants have fairly big implications.
Spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine ahead!
A myriad of Wolverines
Deadpool & Wolverine not only features universe-crossing action but also, at one point, reveals various variants of both titular superheroes. The Wolverine we know in this film is not the same version of Logan from the pre-existing X-Men movies, but instead a version of the character from Earth-10005. That said, in one scene, we do get nearly infinite Wolverines from infinite Earth, with nearly all of them played by Hugh Jackman.
Among the stand-out alternate Wolverines are one Wolverine that is in his original first-ever comic-book costume, as well as the version of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine who is significantly shorter than Jackman is in real life. Ever since the year 2000, comic book purists have complained that in the comics (and in the X-Men cartoon), Logan isn’t nearly as tall as Hugh Jackman and that his shorter stature should have been reflected on screen.
But among all of those other Logans, one will likely stick out in audiences' minds more than others. The one Wolverine variant who is not Hugh Jackman.
The Uncanny Cavill
Clad in a white tank top, but with that signature Wolverine hair, Henry Cavill has smashed into the MCU. Obviously best known as Superman in the DCEU movies, starting with 2013’s Man of Steel, Cavill has, of late, been cropping up in very meta-fictional roles. In Argylle he played the eponymous imagined version of a James Bond-like figure, a kind of Snuffleupagus character in the mind of the “real” main character, Ellie Conway (Bryce Dallas-Howard). Cavill also starred as Gus March-Phillipps in Guy Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a highly fictionalized account of real WWII espionage events, which were orchestrated by Bond author Ian Fleming, who, as played by Freddie Fox, is also a character in the film. So, that’s two slightly unreal versions of James Bond Cavill has played, and that’s just this year.
He’s also been a sidekick version of Sherlock Holmes in the two Netflix Enola Holmes movies, which star Millie Bobby Brown. And of course, he was replaced by Liam Hemsworth the lead in The Witcher, and also was replaced as Superman by David Corenswet in James Gunn’s upcoming DC Superman reboot. To be clear, he’s a great actor, but sometimes it feels Cavill is more meme than man.
And now, he’s an alternate version of Wolverine! Because, of course, if someone other than Hugh Jackman to play a Wolverine variant, it’s gotta be Henry Cavill, the man who almost beat Daniel Craig as Bond for the lead role in Casino Royale in 2006. Somewhere, there’s an alternate universe in which Cavill was the true lead in all of these projects, but in Deadpool & Wolverine, it seems he’s in on the joke of certain aspects of his own career.
That said, even if the brief appearance of Cavill as Wolverine is intended as a kind of inside-baseball visual joke (which is the fuel that Deadpool & Wolverine runs on) Marvel has now, canonically, established that one very real Wolverine does look exactly like Henry Cavill. Considering that Chris Evans returned in this movie not as Captain America, but as the Human Torch, it seems possible — however unlikely — that Marvel could very well bring back Cavill as their primary Wolverine in the near (or distant) future.
Because at the end of the day, Deadpool & Wolverine did not fully introduce the X-Men to the MCU. This means the a hypothetical future MCU Wolverine might not be Hugh Jackman at all. We may be looking right at him And his name is Cavill. Henry Cavill.
