Shooting on the ‘Statue of Liberty’ set, where the film’s climax takes place.

You might think that would make him a pretty happy guy. But, no: like all the other X-People, his powers are not without their down side. “He’s a very dark character,” insists Jackman. “No one knows how old he is, because he has this regeneration ability. But the skeleton that he has, he was not born with. He was tested on and tortured and experimented with.

“Then, after that experiment, 15 years ago when the story starts, he woke up and had no memories. He woke up a grown man, literally naked in the middle of a forest with absolutely no past and a body that he doesn’t understand. He has no idea who he is or where he’s come from, so there’s a real darkness to him: there’s an anger, a melancholy at times giving way to despair, because there seems to be no hope for him.”

James Marsden as Cyclops, whose gaze can destroy whatever it settles on.

In one memorable scene, the character of Rogue - a young girl who can absorb the powers of any other mutant she touches but will, by the same token, kill any human simply by touching them - tries to comfort him when he has a nightmare about the experiment. Wolverine feels an especially close bond with Rogue, but his reaction is instinctive.

“I wake up, and still think I’m in a dream. The last thing in the dream is this man who is about to fatally wound me, and I wake up and see this blurry figure above me and I bring out my claws and rise up screaming and plunge them straight into Rogue. It’s a shocking scene. But what transpires from that is quite miraculous.”

Since the full-facial-hair option for Wolverine was quickly abandoned, Jackman did not have to spend quite so much time in make-up as some of his colleagues. “He’s wearing very tiny hair pieces on his chops [sideburns], and we did have some insets in the back of his head that we’ve since eliminated since his hair has been growing,” says make-up specialist Gordon Smith. “But there’s probably about 15 different sets of blades that he wears, some in gloves, some on his bare hands. Some of them are real. Some of them are plastic. Some of them are bendy. Some of them are chopped off for punching through walls and stuff like that. But his character is pretty straight-forward, so there’s not a lot of dicking around.”

For TV personality Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (she does the fashion show on MTV in the US), however, it was a whole different ballgame. Playing Brotherhood member Mystique who can shift into any shape she wishes, Romijn-Stamos’ basic appearance is scaly, naked and 100% blue. “My call times were one to three a.m. for the most part,” she says, “and we’d be ready seven to eight hours later. Four women worked on me. Two-thirds of my body was covered in prosthetics and the rest with prosthetic scales - over 100 prosthetics in all. And then the rest was all air-brushed with blue paint, which made me really sick to my stomach. It was the most mind-numbing process you could imagine, and I maintain that nobody without modelling experience could have handled it.”