Hugh Jackman & Willem Dafoe Talk Superhero Movies: “A Whole Industry Has Grown Around Marvel And DC”

When it comes to superhero movies, Hugh Jackman and Willem Dafoe have seen it all. The former said farewell to Wolverine this year with “Logan,” one of the grittiest superhero movies ever made, and one that has already earned some awards season love. Meanwhile, Dafoe has seen it all, having already been through the circus with Sam Raimi‘s “Spider-Man” movies, and getting ready to make a splash in next year’s “Aquaman” (the scenes he filmed for “Justice League” were cut).

The pair have been through the superhero trenches, and they talk shop in Variety’s “Actors On Actors” conversation. As Dafoe notes, these blockbusters are keeping a whole lot of people employed.

“A whole industry has grown around Marvel and DC. They’re movies that get exported in a successful way, so I think that’s what drives them very much. They’re stories that cross across cultural conditions, so it can work as well in Asia as well as it can in the United States because the stories are muscular enough and the set-pieces visually exciting enough,” he observed.

While these tentpoles are standard operating procedure for any studio today, Dafoe remembers a time when that wasn’t the case t all. “When ‘Spider-Man’ was proposed to me originally it was like, ‘Really, you’re going to make a movie from a comic book?’” he said. “It was like I was slumming it, you know? I didn’t see it that way, but some people were like, ‘Really?’”

As for Jackman, his long reign in the X-Men movies means he’s heard it said more than once that superhero movies are a trend that will fizzle out. “Ten years ago I remember hearing people say, ‘I don’t think this will last much longer,’ and it’s just continued to grow. I don’t think anyone saw that coming,” he said. “I think ‘X-Men‘ did a lot, particularly when it opened up in a concentration camp and the idea that we were taking it seriously in terms of more humanistic rather than superhuman. Then I think [Christopher] Nolan really just raised the bar to a whole new level and made people see beyond just any kind of genre. It’s not just a genre film.”

Check out these comments and more in the conversations below. [via Collider]