While we’ve known for a while now that Logan would be Hugh Jackman’s last turn as comicdom’s favorite “Bub”-dubbing claw-handed Canuck, his co-star Patrick Stewart has been less clear about his own future with with nearly two-decades-strong X-Men franchise. But not anymore: Vulture reports on a SiriusXM Town Hall Stewart recently gave, in which he announced that he’d told Jackman, “I’m done, too.”
Why is Stewart giving up his most iconic non-starship-based role? Because Logan is just too damn good, apparently. The actor recounted a story of crying while watching the film with Jackman and director James Mangold at the Berlin Film Festival, when he realized “there will never be a better, a more perfect, a more sensitive, emotional, and beautiful way of saying au revoir to Charles Xavier than this movie. So, I told [Jackman] that same evening, ‘I’m done too. It’s all over.’”
Of course, Stewart’s departure doesn’t mean the wider X-Men franchise won’t keep trundling along. Long-time producer Simon Kinberg—who’s considered the smart-money candidate to direct the series’ next film—has hinted to The Hollywood Reporter that the next X-Men movie would tackle the Dark Phoenix saga. Besides wiping the last traces of the Dark Phoenix-lite X-Men: The Last Stand from the franchise’s history, it would raise some interesting questions about who’d play Professor Charles Xavier in the hypothetical film. Stewart’s out, obviously, while James McAvoy finished up his three-film contract for the part with last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse.