His new film Pan has been panned but the star says he had ‘maybe too much’ fun playing the villain Blackbeard. He talks about reaching peak superhero and why it’s time to hang up his X-Men claws
Hugh Jackman certainly puts himself about these days. Luckily, there’s enough of him to go round. A decade and a half ago, he put himself on the cultural radar as Wolverine, the sharp-clawed, short-tempered, unbelievably strapping X-Man. Today, the Jackman blip could appear anywhere. He is still being Wolverine – more of which later. But he is just as likely to crop up in a serious thriller, a Broadway stage drama, a children’s TV show or a musical. One minute he is up for an award (a Tony for stage musical The Boy from Oz, a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for Les Misérables), the next he’s hosting the awards ceremony (the Tonys, the 2009 Oscars). He even won an award for hosting an awards ceremony. And since all of this clearly isn’t enough Jackman for the hardcore fanbase, he’s also preparing a one-man arena tour of Australia next month, in which he will sing, dance, show videos and tell stories of his life and career. New dates were recently added to cope with the demand.
Jackman himself seems surprised at his own ubiquity. “I always thought, when I started out, I’d try and open as many doors as possible and try and keep ’em open,” he says, “and I kept thinking, those doors are going to slam shut, and at one point it’ll be Wolverine and musicals, or it’ll be this or that. But, weirdly, what I’m known for now is more that versatility than any particular door.”
He is in a good mood, relaxed and fresh-looking, like he has just got out of the gym. This is a week before the release of his new movie, Pan. The title has proved to be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Directed by Britain’s Joe Wright, this lavish Peter Pan prequel looks set to be one of the biggest flops of the year. Quotes you won’t be seeing on Pan’s poster include “absolutely no suspense and a very limited sense of fun” (Hollywood Reporter) and “This joyless, 10-megaton bomb fails in just about every imaginable way, as well as some you couldn’t possibly imagine” (New York Post). And with an opening weekend of just $15.5m in the US, Pan looks unlikely to recoup its $150m budget. Even if he had known all this at the time, you suspect Jackman would still be in a good mood.
He plays Blackbeard, the villain of the piece, who looks more like an 18th-century vampire than a pirate: black armour, feathered ruff around the neck, coiffured wig on his bald head, exuberant facial hair. Exuberant everything, in fact. Jackman gets to sing, shout, cavort, sneer, be nasty to children and sword-fight. He had “maybe too much fun” doing it, he says. He makes his entrance on a flying pirate ship, somersaulting across the decks, while in the mines of Neverland below, a stadium-sized crowd chants Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Probably not what JM Barrie had in mind, but Jackman at least establishes a seriocomic tone the rest of the movie lacks.
“Joe [Wright] was saying, ‘I want to employ your theatrical side,’” Jackman explains. “I said: ‘You mean the big, hammy side?’ He said: ‘I wouldn’t put it that way, but yeah.’”
It’s not so easy for Jackman to play a baddie, even a big hammy one. He is just too much of a nice guy. It’s the nature of modern film promotion that everyone says everyone is “a pleasure to work with” and all that, but Wright sounds sincere when he describes Jackman as “one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life”. Pretty much everybody else concurs. On big movies such as Pan, Jackman buys lottery tickets for the entire crew every Friday, to make the set feel less segregated.
“I didn’t have any power in this industry until I was maybe 30,” he says, “and I’ve had many, many jobs where I was way down the other end of the food chain, and so I always respected the people who were at the top who seemed to care about what you did and appreciate you. So I’ve tried to never forget that.”
He talks about when he was in his early 20s at drama school in Perth, Australia. He worked as a barman in the VIP area of a local venue. A lot of people treated him like dirt, he says, but one person who was always good to him was Paul Dainty, Australia’s top music promoter. “He was in and out every month with a show,” Jackman says, “and he’d have a whisky on the rocks and he’d always have a chat and ask how I was. I was nobody to him.” Now Dainty is promoting Jackman’s one-man show.
If there is a dark side to Jackman, nobody has yet discovered it. To all appearances, he is the sort of blemish-free alpha celeb you could easily imagine going into politics. He has been happily married for nearly 20 years to actor Deborra-Lee Furness, who he met on his first job, an Australian TV drama. They have two adopted children. He does charity work for good causes. He is also well-connected: a godparent of Rupert Murdoch’s two youngest daughters, and has described Murdoch as “a very generous, caring family man”.
“I suppose there have been times where I’ve been a bit short with people,” he offers. “And I find that the minute after, my mind is like, ‘Why did you do that? That poor person, they just wanted a photo,’ Or whatever. It stays in my head. It’s actually harder work for me. It’s easier for me to be polite and look people in the eye and shake their hand than to do it any other way. Maybe it’s just the way I was brought up.”
Jackman as Wolverine in the first X-Men film in 2000
As with everything else, Jackman’s upbringing is ostensibly an open book. He is the youngest of five siblings, son of well-to-do British parents who emigrated to Australia in 1967. They divorced when he was eight years old and his mother returned to Britain. The siblings’ 18th birthday presents were tickets to Britain, he says. His elder two sisters decided to stay there when they visited. The first time Jackman came to Britain was in the early 1980s, for the wedding of one of his sisters. “I remember going with my dad to Harrods. Remember how Harrods used to say they could get anything? He said his daughter was getting married and he wanted Australian wine. They said no.”
“By the way,” he adds, “everything I’m telling you I would tell my mum cos she’s a Guardian reader, as am I. She will read this.”
London was also where he got his big break, in the National Theatre’s 1998 production of Oklahoma! The year after, against expectations and first-choice preferences (Dougray Scott was initially cast), he landed the part of Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men. This was at a time when superhero movies were still regarded as erratic novelty items rather than default blockbusters. The notorious Batman & Robin had bombed just a few years before, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man was still two years away, and Comic-Con was a niche event for nerds. “I remember people saying to me, ‘You’ve got to book another film before this thing comes out, because the word on the street is not great. These films are dead – no one understands what it is.’” Jackman remembers. “Then when it came out, I was getting phone calls at 7am on the Saturday morning from drunk studio execs saying it was doing double what they had expected.”
The rest is history, and Jackman has been an essential part of it. He has reprised the Wolverine role another six times (counting his micro-cameo in X-Men: First Class) and will do so once again next year – for the last time. Now, no major studio can afford not to have a superhero franchise, to the extent that the coming decade threatens an onslaught of sequels, sagas and spin-offs. Have we reached peak superhero?
I would love to go out [of X-Men] where I felt we were doing something new and interesting
“My gut feeling is yes,” Jackman says with little hesitation. “Having said that, it’s gone beyond what I thought. If I look at the X-Men series, I think the last one [X-Men: Days of Future Past] was one of the best.”
A few years ago, Jackman detailed the gruelling “Wolverine workout” he goes through to get that ripped physique for each movie. Does he hesitate each time they ask him back? Especially now he’s a serious, Oscar-nominated actor? “If I was hesitating I wouldn’t do it. I …” He pauses to choose the right words. “I … I don’t think all the X-Men and Wolverines have been great, and I’m not going to pretend … the intention was always there and everyone worked super-hard and all of that. I do think we’re in a really great place with the character. This next one, from what I’m hearing, is going to be fantastic. I would love to go out where I felt we were really doing something new and interesting and valid, and I don’t know how much longer I can contribute to that. I’m sure there are other people who can.”
Is Wolverine going to die? I’m scanning his eyes for some giveaway hint.
“I honestly don’t know. We haven’t finished the script actually. The last email I had, it was up to page 60. So he doesn’t die before page 60!”
Before the next Wolverine workout, though, and on top of the current promotional rounds, he has been taking tap-dancing classes and the like in preparation for his one-man show. “It’s ridiculous to call it a one-man show when there’s about a hundred people on stage with me,” he laughs.
Why does he do it?
“I love it,” he says. “I sat watching Sting, who’s a friend, with a symphony orchestra, and my agent was next to me and he said, ‘You’re just itching to get up there. You should do this.’ To me it’s like going on a four-day golfing trip with my buddies.” Then Jackman’s instinct for self-deprecation kicks in once again. “I mean, it’s very egocentric: it’s all the things that I enjoy and I’m good at. I’m fully aware it’s a very selfish show, but I have a blast doing it.”
Matt Damon recently suggested in an interview that “you’re a better actor the less people know about you”. He got into all kinds of trouble for saying it, but it’s an interesting point in the context of Jackman, an actor who seems happy for everyone to know everything about him. Does all this exposure affect an actor’s ability to disappear into a role? Is there a danger of Jackman giving away too much of himself?
“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” he replies. “I feel very, very free on stage and I really like connecting in that way. And I don’t think enough people have seen me do it compared to what they’ve seen me do as an actor. But if you told me today that for the rest of my life I couldn’t do any more acting and I’d just do that, I’d probably be pretty happy, actually.” None of those doors looks as if it is in danger of closing for Jackman right now. If anything, you suspect there are even more he could open.
