There are few actors as closely associated with their most well-known role as Hugh Jackman is with Wolverine. A character who is now intrinsically linked with the actor in the minds of many fans despite the fact he very nearly didn’t get the role due to being a clear foot taller than the character is in his native comics. Something they fixed by simply telling Jackman to take his shoes off.
First though, for anyone who isn’t familiar with the character of Wolverine, in the comics he hails from, the Mutant Menace is generally described as being just a hair over 5ft 3 inches tall. Which makes sense when you consider his namesake is a feral 8 pound weasel that routinely attacks fucking bears.
Something that already sees Wolverine’s cohorts tower over him but then you have to consider that his usual fighting stance has him crouched all of the way over like a coiled spring of chest hair and adamantium-laced fists …
The end result is Wolverine being a at least a foot shorter than near enough everyone around him, including the literal actual children he occasionally teaches and/or is hurled into a waiting Sentinels head by.
Admittedly the comics rarely acknowledge exactly how short Knife Hand Joe is because, well, it’s kind of hard to take him seriously as an utter badass when he’s barely tall enough to look over the bar of a place he’s hammering bottles of Jack at.
Anyway, the story goes that when Huge Jacked Man was cast as ol’ Knifey Wolfy his 6ft 2 inch frame was a sticking point with producers behind the scenes who were worried comic fans online would do what they do best. Endlessly bitch about it.
To address this, according to Jackman himself, they told him to never wear shoes on set and even went as far as to make other members of the cast stand on boxes in scenes he appeared in. The only exception to this being scenes where Wolverine appears next to children, in which they use camera tricks to make them appear to be the same height. Something you probably never noticed initially as they use such shots very sparingly but if you look at you can sort of tell something is amiss.
Again, according to Jackman, he even walked around while crouched down in some scenes to help sell him being much shorter than he is in real life, which while admirable was sort of pointless. Why? Well, because apparently nobody gave a shit and the expected complaints from weird comic fans never came because Jackman simply embodied the character that well. As such, they stopped doing this for later movies much to the relief of Hugh Jackman’s knees.
