As the clock ticks down on Hugh Jackman‘s tenure as Wolverine, details are beginning to appear on “Logan,” the upcoming “X-Men” film that will see Jackman play an aged Wolverine with diminished powers. In addition to some plot details and the addition of a senile Professor X to the cast, we now know that several lesser-known characters from the comic books will make an appearance. But who are these characters? Read on to learn more about them.
The little girl that Logan will adopt and protect in the movie is a younger version of X-23, a mutant clone created by the team behind Project Weapon X to replicate Wolverine’s powers. In the comics, X-23 undergoes torturous physical and mental conditioning to turn her into an obedient killing machine, including radiation poisoning and mental triggers.
In the comics, X-23 eventually crosses paths with Wolverine, who becomes a mentor figure for her. Unfortunately, Wolverine was killed in the comics, after which X-23 decided to honor his memory by taking up his mantle and becoming the new Wolverine. She later adopted a young clone named Gabby, who was created using the same Wolverine cloning process.
X-23 was originally created for the animated series “X-Men Evolution.” In that series, she was a teenage assassin who was created by HYDRA to attack the X-Men. She had a rocky relationship with Wolverine, as she blamed him for her pain. Eventually, though, she comes to accept him as a positive force in her life and allows Wolverine to help her take down HYDRA.
In the comics, the scientist responsible for X-23’s creation is Dr. Zander Rice, whose father was involved in Weapon X and was killed by Wolverine. Rice was in charge of the processes that put X-23 through years of pain, as well as the “trigger scent,” a pheromone that overrode the mutant’s free will and allowed her handlers to send her to kill whomever they wished.
One of his most sadistic practices — and one he did out of bitterness over his father’s death — was to fuse X-23’s claws into her hands without anesthesia. Eventually, history repeated itself when X-23 killed Rice, but Rice had the last laugh as he used his dying breath and the trigger scent to order her to kill her surrogate mother, Sarah.
Zander isn’t the only villain in “Logan.” As revealed by the film’s Instagram page, “Narcos” star Boyd Holbrook will play Donald Pierce, the leader of the Reavers.
Pierce is a cyborg-human hybrid who was nearly killed by Wolverine during a battle with the X-Men. Swearing revenge, he and four other cyborgs created an army of henchmen and formed the Reavers to destroy the X-Men.
Eventually, Pierce expanded his war beyond the X-Men and began planning to eradicate all mutants from the world. But despite his attempts to overpower Wolverine by replacing nearly all his human tissue with cybernetics, he was defeated.
One villain you won’t see in “Logan” is Nathaniel Essex, a.k.a. Mr. Sinister. He was teased in the “X-Men: Apocalypse” post-credits scene, as agents from his corporation gathered material Wolverine left behind in his bloody escape from his Weapon x containment cell. But it seems that the scene was meant to tease a different future X-Men film.
