Hugh Jackman celebrates Logan's third birthday with series of shirtless snaps

Hugh Jackman has celebrated the third anniversary of Logan in the best way possible: with a gallery of insanely ripped shirtless promo shots.

Released into cinemas on 3 March, 2017, Logan was Jackman’s eighth and final appearance as X-Men hero Wolverine, and his celebratory Instagram post called it “the role of a lifetime”.

The film was a huge hit for Jackman and, as the photos show, the 51-year-old Aussie was in the best shape of his life for the James Mangold-directed superhero movie.

“3 years ago ... on this day. LOGAN was released,” his social media post reads.

Read more: Watch Hugh Jackman choking up on last day as Wolverine

“#thankyou for the many (and really mean MANY) years of sweat, steamed chicken and, the role of a lifetime!”

The gallery of images shared on Instagram show Jackman, in character as a bearded Wolverine, holding seven different iconic superhero poses, presumably for promotional use. They don’t appear to have been used in marketing materials for the film though.

Take That star Robbie Williams was among the many people who commented on the post, with the Angels singer simply replying “Don” on the picture, accompanied with a punching fist emoji.

Alongside a strict diet and insane workout regime, Jackman has previously revealed that the secret to his vein-popping, ripped physique in the X-Men films is dehydration.

He told Stephen Colbert while promoting the film, that in the weeks leading up to his shirtless scenes, he'll gradually drink more and more water (up to 10 litres a day), then go without drinking anything for the 36 hours before the scene.

"You know that if you go three days without water, you die," Colbert replied, when Jackman explained this strategy on The Late Show. "You go as close as you can, and then, and then put the claws on, dammit," Jackman replied. "But you lose like 10 pounds of all of this, water weight. Don't do it."

The film, inspired by Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan comic series, featured an aged Wolverine in the near future, with his mutant healing powers on the wane. He teams up with Patrick Stewart’s dying Charles Xavier to save a young mutant (Dafne Keen) who has similar powers to Logan.

It was critical and commercial smash when it was released and is regularly cited as one of the best superhero films ever made. Its script, by Scott Frank, James Mangold and Michael Green, became the first live action superhero movie to receive an Academy Award nomination for writing.

It was also the most complained about movie of 2017, as the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) received 20 complaints about the movie’s violence, which viewers thought should have earned it an 18 certificate, rather than the 15 rating it was released with.

Following the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, the future of the X-Men and Wolverine remains unclear, but the inevitable reboot of the characters within the MCU remains years off.