Hugh Jackman is getting ready to reprise the role of Wolverine, and the Australian actor isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to getting back to that superhero physique.
Jackman will be playing Wolverine opposite Ryan Reynolds‘s Deadpool in upcoming Deadpool 3, which is slated to start filming in May, according to Collider. That means Jackman only has a few more months to get into fighting shape—literally—and the Bad Education star shared a look on Instagram at what his eating regimen has been like to get back to that shredded, bulked-up body Wolverine is known for.
The star shared a photo of various labeled food containers on a countertop, captioning it: “Bulking. A day in the life. Thank you Chef Mario for helping me stay healthy and properly fed whilst . . . Becoming. Wolverine. Again.”
The containers are carefully labeled with both the food contents and their calorie count: “Black Bass with Veggie Rice + Herb Sauce 2000 cal,” reads one. “Chicken burger with sweet potatoes 1000 cal” read two others. The other three are labeled as grassfed top sirloin with noodles (1,100 calories, and there are two of them) and Patagonia salmon with potatoes and hot sauce (2,100 cal). This brings Jackman’s daily caloric intake to a whopping 8,300.
Jackman explained to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show back in January that part of the reason he needed to eat such an extreme calorie surplus was because he was burning so many while starring in the latest Broadway production of The Music Man.
“I wore a heart rate monitor [for The Music Man] because my trainer said, ‘I need to know what I’m working with here, because I’m trying to bulk you up,'” Jackman explained at the time. “I burned 1,500 calories in the show, eight times a week. So she goes: ‘Oh, you gotta eat.’ So I was eating 4,500 calories a day, it was not pretty. Now I’m just eating and training.”
Now, Jackman is eating nearly twice that amount, and with his final Music Man performance behind him, likely spending his days in hours-long grueling strength workouts to convert all those calories into muscle. It’s one of the highest-calorie daily diets we’ve ever seen for actors bulking up for a role, including Jonathan Majors’s recent bulk-up for Creed III and Magazine Dreams, for which he told Variety he was eating 6,100 calories a day to grow his 6-foot, 202-pound physique.
The actor has astounded us with his Wolverine transformations before, and his Deadpool III appearance could be the most jacked we’ve seen Jackman yet.
