From Wolverine to song-and-dance man, and from a robot boxing trainer to the 'sexiest man alive' (though his wife might laugh at the notion), Hugh Jackman is many things to many people. He talks to DONALD CLARKE
MINUTES BEFORE I trip in to meet Hugh Jackman, I click on the website for Varietymagazine. There he is on the home page. The venerable trade paper has announced that the suave Australian is to appear in a one-man show on Broadway. He'll be singing, joking and hoofing. How quaint. You can't quite imagine Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt shimmying their way through standards from Oklahomaor Paint Your Wagon. But Jackman, now 42, really is a very old-fashioned class of star.
“Oh mate, it is like the ultimate indulgence,” he says after pumping my hand warmly. “I can’t believe I am doing it. I have an 18-piece orchestra to play my favourite songs. I am really excited.”
Jackman displayed his musical theatre skills in 2009 when he won acclaim for his turn as host of the Oscars. It was a revealing performance. Nothing about it suggested we were looking at a man who cared about being cool. He looked gruffly charismatic as Wolverinein the X-Menfilms. He held his own against Nicole Kidman in Australia. But his main job is as (tad da!) an entertainer.
“I’m the youngest from a family of six,” he muses. “Mum always said, ‘You don’t have to stand on a chair to be noticed.’ I remember talking to John Travolta about this. He’s the youngest of five, and it is statistically incredible how many people in show biz are the youngest from multiple-kid families. You are used to people looking at you.”
If you can't make it to Broadway, you can enjoy a rather more muscular incarnation of Jackman in an upcoming film entitled Real Steel. Shawn Levy's drama, based on a story by Richard Matheson, is surprisingly diverting for a film about boxing robots. The picture, a shameless amalgam of The Champ and Rocky, finds Jackman playing impresario to the little cyborg that could.
His character is a washed-up boxer and, in order to get his moves right, he worked with the former champ Sugar Ray Leonard.
“We didn’t really spar. He hit me a few times in the stomach and, I can tell you, that was more than enough. I am a typical actor. If I got properly hit, I’d probably start crying.”
Yes, he doesn’t strike you as the kind of guy who gets into too many fights. Mind you, looking at those biceps, I feel fairly confident he could handle himself.
“I do remember getting knocked out in Bath once,” he laughs. “I was singing Australian songs when drunk in a bar and some local got pissed off and hit me.”
Jackman, who was raised in Sydney, stumbled into show business. He enjoyed messing about in plays as a kid, but never seriously imagined his hobby could become a profession. He studied communications at college and claims that, had the acting not worked out, he could have seen himself hosting a breakfast television show. That sounds plausible. He has the charm. He has the teeth.
At any rate, following work on Australian television, he eventually secured a part in the National Theatre's London production of Oklahoma.
“It was all an accident. I secretly might have hoped one day to be in the ensemble of a musical. But I never thought I had the chops. But in Australia you can’t just be a movie actor. They only make 11 movies a year or whatever.”
He radiates positivity. As tall as you might think, housed in gleaming skin, he makes a quiet hotel room come alive. Indeed, you might argue that his presence is a bit too highly energised for film. Nonetheless, a few years after that triumph on stage, he was selected to play Wolverine – the hairiest of the mutants – in Bryan Singer's version of X-Men.A different class of fame now came into play. Suddenly, a million kids on the internet were discussing his suitability.
“The interesting thing was when that first came out I looked very different. Very few people recognised me on the street. So I did have a weird kind of obscurity. It wasn’t until X-Men 2 came out that I started to get noticed. And that was about being seen on chat shows. By then I was 30. I knew better how to handle it.”
He agrees that what really knocked him up the show-business ladder was being named "sexiest man alive" by Peoplemagazine.
“That took it to a ridiculous level. Photographers began noticing me. It really changed.”
Jackman, having been married to Deborra-Lee Furness, an Australian actor, since 1996, has one of the more settled of Hollywood domestic lives. He makes sure never to leave his two adopted children for longer than two weeks. Furness must have been proud to discover herself married to the world’s most desirable man.
“She really laughed. I swear to God. ‘Really? You? Not Brad Pitt?’ But then she said, ‘Ah, who else would I marry?’ Ha ha! Sexiest man alive? Not before noon, I can tell you.”
In truth, X-Menaside, Jackman's films have not performed particularly well. Australiawas a famous flop. Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, an epic love story co-starring Rachel Weisz, also crashed and burned spectacularly. But you get a sense that Hollywood needs him. Old-school song-and-dance people are pretty thin on the ground, and that's exactly the species you need to host the Oscars. The show itself was a bit gimmicky, but most agreed that Jackman had the right stuff.
“The most frightening part is after you say yes, and you don’t know what you are supposed to be doing. I remembered Billy Crystal doing it, and thought ‘I am not a comedian’. I went to the first talk and was handed two sheets of paper with a breakdown. ‘There are 12 segments of Hugh Jackman. We open with seven or eight minutes, then cut to a commercial.’ That’s it? Actors are used to having a script. But I really enjoyed the performance part of it.”
It was announced recently that he is to play Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper's version of the musical Les Misérables. It looks like being a very Australian affair. Russell Crowe is currently pencilled in as Inspector Javert, the dogged antagonist, and Geoffrey Rush is being discussed as a potential Thénardier, the boisterous tavern landlord. Jackman says that making the film would fulfil one of his few remaining ambitions.
“Yeah, one of them is to do a proper movie musical. I would also love to do a Shakespeare with Trevor Nunn. I am really not a great believer in setting goals. When I was younger the extent of my dreams was very modest. I didn’t dare to dream.”
Yet, for all his casualness, he still worries that the phone will stop ringing. “That’s true. People do ask if you’re terrified about that sort of thing. Hey, I’m just thrilled that people remember my name.”
Real Steelis released next week
