Liam McIntyre said his Wolverine in Marvel’s Wolverine is built from the character’s past as much as from his own instincts. The actor said he pulled from every previous performance he could find, but stopped short of copying Hugh Jackman, Cal Dodd or Steve Blum.
That matters now because Marvel’s Wolverine is set to launch on PS5 on Sept. 15, giving fans of Wolverine and Marvel a first look at how Insomniac Games plans to handle a character with decades of recognizable interpretations behind him. McIntyre is also voicing James “Logan” Howlett in the game, placing his version of the mutant at the center of one of Sony’s biggest releases of the fall.
McIntyre described the approach as a kind of craft exercise. He said there were “so many great teachers” in the performances that came before, and that his job was to find “the essence of Wolverine” while bringing something of himself to the role. In his words, “it was every single one,” a shorthand for the way he said he studied the character across film and games before settling on his own take.
That method creates a clear comparison point. Jackman, Dodd and Blum each established a distinct version of Wolverine in decades of prior portrayals, and McIntyre said he treated those performances as a starting point rather than a blueprint. The difference in practice is not imitation but selection: he said he wanted the anger and brutality that define Logan, but also a more vulnerable edge, which Polygon said was part of a “multifaceted” performance.
Polygon’s review was far less kind to the game around him. It criticized Marvel’s Wolverine’s story and overall execution, and said the title was one of Sony’s worst-reviewed PS5 exclusives, even while singling out McIntyre’s take on Logan for praise. That split leaves the performance as one of the few elements already carrying real weight before release, especially with the game scheduled to arrive just one day before McIntyre’s other voice role, Ax Battler in Golden Axe, begins its run on Sept. 16.
For now, the unanswered question is not whether McIntyre studied the role carefully. It is whether the finished game will let that layered performance land the way he intended, or whether the criticism aimed at the story and execution will end up overwhelming one of the release’s strongest early selling points.
