I saw Logan weeks ago, but I’m still in awe of Dafne Keen’s performance. While the film is a fitting swan song for star Hugh Jackman and the culmination of his work on the character for the past 17 years, it also functions as a passing of the torch with Keen’s Laura/X-23 poised to pick up the hero mantle and find her own way in the world. To not only follow Jackman’s performance but to channel it would be a tall order for any actor, let alone one as young as Keen, but she handled it brilliantly.

Last week, I spoke with Keen and director James Mangold about Logan. We discussed the casting process, if the studio ever wanted X-23 to be a teenager rather than a child, what Mangold learned from making The Wolverine, how Keen prepared to play X-23, how they approached the stunt work, working with Jackman, and more. Check out the interview below, and click here for Steve Weintraub’s spoiler-filled interview with Mangold. Logan is now in theaters.

How did the audition process go when it came to casting X-23?

JAMES MANGOLD: Well, Dafne, do you want to answer this one?

DAFNE KEEN: I sent in a tape.

MANGOLD: I actually wish I could do interviews with this much brevity as Dafne has, but yeah, they made a tape of her climbing around their house, doing somersaults, and acting in some scenes from the film. All of it was amazing, especially the scaling of the 12-foot bookshelves, and I immediately felt when I saw this tape, and obviously there was a worldwide search going on for this role, for someone 10 to 12 years old, physically skilled, Hispanic, bilingual, physically capable, tremendous actress, and all of these things combined. Obviously, this cuts down on the number of people you’re going to get responding, but from Dafne’s tape, I knew this was the kid. It was that kind of clarifying moment. You just know the answer.

One of the things I love about this film is that X-23 is a kid and not a teenager. Did the studio ever push to make the role a teenager so they could get an actress that could work longer hours?

MANGOLD: There was some talk from the studio, some people did wonder whether—it wasn’t really about working longer hours—I think some people had trouble understanding how an 11-year-old could be deadly. Being a father of a 9 and 12-year-old, I have no problem understanding how an 11-year-old can be deadly. I felt that if we got into the teenage years of X-23, it would feel like a CW show. And the X-Men movies have done a lot of young characters with adults playing these parts. I wanted to confront Logan with what he was most frightened of, which was the idea of being a dad. A real dad, not to an unruly teenager, but to a child.

I think it works wonderfully, especially with you, Dafne, in how you channel that Wolverine persona. What was it like trying to get into the mindset of being Wolverine’s daughter?

KEEN: It was…fun? And we went to the zoo and I looked at animals to inspire the character, and I saw this bear and I thought about it.

What was it like working with Hugh?

KEEN: It was really nice. And he’s really nice. We had just finished a scene, a scene in the car, and he put on AC/DC.

MANGOLD: There was some heavy metal playing? That sounds fun. Was it the scene where you take over driving?

KEEN: It’s the scene where I’m in the backseat.

MANGOLD: Oh, that scene.

The stunt scenes are incredible. How did you approach doing them?

MANGOLD: Daph?

KEEN: All the stunt people were really nice to be, and it was incredible, and I loved the wirework.

MANGOLD: She loved the wirework. Whenever she wasn’t working on screen, she was going daily to, we kind of had this gymnasium with pads and stunt guys when they weren’t being Reavers or stunt doubles on those days, maybe she’d get together and rehearse with them.

I learned things over the years. One of them was that there are actors who own the physicality of their roles in action movies and there are actors who just can’t. And you can’t recognize it in a child and you can recognize it in an adult. For instance, Hugh Jackman is physically skilled. You can show him stunt choreography and he’ll figure it out, and no one gets hurts, and he knows how to hit his marks, and he knows what he needs to do, but it all sort of feels alive and not a set of moves where you fill in the blanks. Similarly, Dafne could really own her physicality. Even from the moment where I first saw that audition tape, because the hardest thing is that you’re acting when you’re doing a fight. It’s more important than ever that you stay angry, that you stay focused, that you know why you’re beating these guys down, what am I trying to get to, what am I doing this for, and Dafne really owns it. She knew how to do the fights, but also how to bring her emotional self to the scenes as well.

What did you learn on The Wolverine that you carried with you into making Logan?

MANGOLD: I’ll put it really simply. I felt that the biggest risk with the studio was that with The Wolverine during the first hour it was too slow and character-driven and everyone wanted to get to the big action on the studio side. I learned that fans were into just watching their heroes live and have scenes. Obviously, they love the action, but I think we were underestimating the maturity of our audience. Very much this movie for me was leaning into believing that our audience is deeply sophisticated and doesn’t need to just have a lot of sounds and explosions every five minutes but can actually sit watching these characters that they love as opposed to needing a burst of action constantly.

And this movie was an expression of that. I mean really committing to the Western. Westerns don’t have a set piece every seven minutes. You tend to have fewer of them and lean into character a lot harder, and we were playing with Westerns. Daph, what do you think? Does that make sense?

KEEN: Completely.

Did you go to any comics in particular for X-23 or did you want to build the character more from scratch?

MANGOLD: No, Craig Kyle’s “Innocence Lost” series, which details the origins of X-23 in a lab and her eventual escape, even the action from the stolen found-footage videos, whether its Gabriella’s or anyone else’s, they were deeply influential. In fact I met with Craig Kyle and he was the one who—and I had no idea why—but the wonderful dialogue that Charles does about Laura’s toe-claws and how they come from female lions and how they have more profound foot-claws, that whole patch of dialogue almost came verbatim from Craig Kyle telling me why they gave her foot-claws originally in the comics.

Where would you like to see X-23’s story go from here?

MANGOLD: I think we’re not going to answer that because we’re figuring that out right now. But I certainly think it would be exciting to see Dafne pick up this character a few years down the line and see her living with a lot of the emotional things that have happened to her in this movie and defined her and seen where she is.