How You Can Actually Kill Wolverine
2. Stick Him On A Plane
Although Wolverine might seem like a man afraid of nothing (a healing factor would probably have that affect on you), his movie counterpart does harbour a rather mundane phobia: a fear of flying.
Yes, the X-Men's most indestructible asset is quite literally terrified of jumping on a plane. It was a fear first raised in 2000's X-Men, but it repeatedly resurfaced in each successive feature, with Hugh Jackman's Logan bemoaning the X-Jet in X2: X-Men United, and pretty much every film that followed it.
But why, pray tell, would Wolverine be afraid of air-travel? He's got a healing factor that would make the Hulk green with envy, and with a metal skeleton to boot, he's just as unstoppable as the Juggernaut himself. Scripts for Fox's X-Men films also make no mention of Wolvie's aerially-averse inclinations, so the culprit responsible, so it would seem, is Hugh Jackman.
The actor himself has oft spoken about his fear of flying, and finding Logan's fearless personality a little too difficult to stomach, he decided to incorporate the phobia directly into his performance.
"I put a fear of flying into Wolverine that wasn’t in the script. I thought, ‘I can’t like somebody who isn’t scared of anything.’"
Jackman has also justified this rationale as a response to Wolverine's animalistic tendencies, saying that "it would be kind of interesting if Wolverine hated flying because it’s unnatural for an animal to fly". That's fair enough, seeing as how most phobias are fairly illogical anyway, but surely there's a more genuine reason for Logan's fraught relationship with air-travel, even if it was just a simple homage to B. A. Baracus' aerial paranoia?
Well, yeah, there is. Speaking to Comicbook.com in the run up to The Wolverine's premier, director James Mangold - when queried if the phobia stemmed from Wolverine's very real (and genuine) fear of drowning - felt that it lent itself well to the character's animalistic nature.
"He's a wonderful character in a sense that he's always struggling. So to me the idea that he doesn't like to fly - it just fits in with the animalistic nature of him also. I don't like to be contained, I don't want to be in a tuna can, I don't like to be under someone else's control. I thought it played."
The guy has a metal skeleton after all and, as was partially illustrated in Days of Future Past (albeit with concrete, rather than adamantium), the bloke'll sink straight to the bottom of a given body of water. (At least in the films.)