Previous snaps from **The Wolverine **have avoided showing us anything but ol' Logan himself, but this batch of eight new stills from Entertainment Weekly reveal a lot more about two new characters, namely Viper and Yukio.
Viper, as you may have guessed, is the lady in green, and she's played by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's Svetlana Khodchenkova. With a name like that, she's not going to be an all-out good 'un, and so it proves with director James Mangold describing her character as "snakelike".
"She likes to play with toxins," he adds. ''Viper views Logan like a great hunter might view hunting a lion in his quarry. There's kind of an admiration, a desire to destroy and a desire to consume and to have and to hold.''
Then there's Yukio, who's altogether friendlier to Wolverine, but by no means less dangerous. Rila Fukushima plays the anime-styled character, who makes friends with The Man Formerly Known As James Howlett and forms what Mangold calls "a unique relationship".
As for the plot, that's best explained by X-producer Hutch Parker, who told us the following in a previous issue of Empire: "We pick up Logan in a very isolated state, full of self-loathing. He is sought out by a young Asian woman (Yukio) for reasons he doesn't fully understand, who is asking him to follow her to Japan where he is meant to reconnect with someone from his past."
"And what you'll come to find is that this is someone he spent prison-time with in Nagasaki. And the legacy of that experience - effectively Logan saved him - is that this man is on his deathbed, and is looking to give him a gift, to thank him for the life he's had."
"But this gift draws Logan into a very complex and very unexpected world within both contemporary Japan and, to some extent, the feudal history of Japan. He's so in isolation, so out of his element. It's a much more powerful distillation of his character than you've seen before."
The Wolverine makes his UK bow on July 25. Expect a trailer any day now.