Australian actor Hugh Jackman said he has to gain 25 pounds for his eponymous role in Wolverine sequel. Hugh revealed that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky wants him to bulk up even more than he did in the first movie.

"It's not easy for me," Hugh Jackman told Entertainment Weekly. "Because I'm actually quite long and lean."

The popular Australian actor, also one of the richest in the Australian entertainment industry, said he turned to his friend The Rock for advice on how to gain 25-pounds of muscle by spring, when shooting for the movie begins.

"I had a chat with Dwayne Johnson, who did 25 pounds for his movie [Faster]."

"I rang him up and was like, Okay, tell me what's going on."

According to Entertainment Weekly, Jackman now has to eat "an awful lot of chicken, steak and brown rice" in order to gain a one pound a week spread throughout six months, which requires 6000 calories a day.

Darren Aronofsky is known to best known as the director of films involving characters, with high physical demands on its actors. In Aronofsky's latest film Black Swan, Natalie Portman has to train rigorously for her role as a ballerina. This is also the case of Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, for which he earned an Oscar nomination. So it's not sort of expected that he will ask Hugh Jackman to bulk up, as the two had previously worked in The Fountain.

Wolverine 2 will be set in Japan and is penned by Christopher McQuarrie. The sequel begins with Hugh Jackman's character drinking at a bar in Japan where X-Men Origins: Wolverine ended. Logan will have a forbidden romance with a Japanese woman who was promised to marry another man. This leads to a a clash between Logan's claws and the woman's father and brother who are samurais.

Check out the latest comics release from Marvel Entertainment below, including the all-new Wolverine and Jubilee!

Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.