For Hugh Jackman, filming X-Men: Days of Future Past in Montreal presented a unique challenge. In order to play Wolverine, Jackman had to subsist on a restrictive diet of mostly steamed chicken. In any other city, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But in Montreal, home to some of the world’s finest restaurants, temptation lurked around every corner.
“This is the only place I can actually have this gripe,”; Jackman tells ET Canada’s Roz Weston. “No one understands what it’s like to be in what is arguably the food capital of the world and literally not eat anything. I can’t tell you how many restaurants I went to with the director, the writer and the other actors and I would literally be passing food out to them, you know, and just eating steamed chicken. I mean it is wrong, but we did actually have one day of re-shoots, so I went back to do one day of re-shoots and man did I eat.”;
All of that dieting and weightlifting have given Jackman a newfound respect for gym rats, a group that he used to openly ridicule. “I worked in a gym for three years behind the counter and I always used to make fun of those guys staring at themselves in the mirror and pushing weights,”; he said. “I had no idea. I had no excuse. I train and eat 50 times more and 50 times better than I did back then.”;
In addition to gaining a newfound respect for gym rats, Jackman has also recently gained a newfound respect for sunscreen. After having two cancerous spots removed from his nose, Jackman—who once regarded the substance as a sign of weakness—can’t sing its praises enough.
“When we were young, there was not a lot of knowledge out there about sunscreen. I mean, on occasion you’d wear it. It was almost like the over protective moms would put sunscreen on and boy were they right,”; he tells Roz. “It was funny how we thought back then, but the thing that I’ve learnt that surprised me the most is that you only have to have been burnt once in your life to be at risk later on. Only once, so that’s almost everyone on the planet… so get checkups. Every time you go to a GP, anytime you got the flu, at the end of it just say, “Please check me, just want to make sure.’ Because this one, I didn’t even see it. It was such a small red mark, I had no idea. So make sure you get checkups and wear sunscreen.”;
