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HUGH JACKMAN
FROM AN X-MAN TO A SONG AND DANCE MAN, HUGH JACKMAN IS REDEFINING THE WORDS "LEADING MAN"
--By David Furnish

David Furnish: This has been a pretty incredible year for you. You’re seven months into your Broadway run of The Boy From Oz, a role for which you’ve been universally acclaimed, and you have a new film coming out this month called Van Helsing. Let’s start by talking about the show. How’s it going?
Hugh Jackman: Oh, mate, it’s going great. This show has probably been one of the most satisfying stage experiences of my career. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder in my life—the show is pretty full-on for me. It’s a tribute to Peter Allen, and frankly, I don’t know how this guy lived his life, given the energy he put out. He used to do two shows a night! He just wanted to live life at Mach 5 all the time. I’m really having a ball, but it’s like jumping into the deep end.

DF: Have you had to adopt a very healthy, keep-fit kind of regime for the role?
HJ: Oh, yeah. I think being on Broadway is the modern equivalent of being a monk. I sleep a lot, eat a lot, and rest a lot. They’ve nicknamed me "Grandpa" around my house because I’m always in my slippers and keep going for naps all the time. The good thing is that during the days I get to pick up my little boy, Oscar. He’s three and a half, and just started nursery school. So he finishes at midday, and with this schedule I get to sleep in, pick him up, and have a few hours with him before going to the theatre.

DF: What was it that drew you to the role of Peter Allen?
HJ: Well, in Australia, where I’m from and where Peter was from, he’s kind of an icon. He was an incredible performer for one thing, and he’s written some songs that are very loved by Australians. But his story really struck a chord with me. He was incredibly brave as a performer. He had a go at everything: His ambitions were limitless, and he had the courage to match it. He had this sort of joie de vivre throughout all the ups and downs in his life. He may not have been the greatest singer or piano player or dancer in the world, but when he performed, he just lit up the stage. He was one of those rare individuals who could have the audience in the palm of his hand from the moment he walked onstage.

DF: Have people who knew Peter been to see the show?
HJ: Of course, yeah—some of them famous, some of them family members. And it’s pretty wild. One woman who particularly touched me was the mother of Peter’s long-term lover Greg, who died of AIDS—he’s portrayed in the show, and she’s come in a few times. It’s very sobering when you’re doing a play and you realize someone in the audience is a close relative of an individual being portrayed onstage. Generally people seem to be thrilled that Peter is being remembered on Broadway, because Broadway was in many ways his great love. The fact that Legs Diamond [the 1988 musical starring and written by Allen] didn’t work was one of the great disappointments of his life. He always wanted to be on Broadway—that was his big, big dream. So the show is a fitting tribute to him, and the people who were closest to him appreciate that. I hope Liza [Minelli, who was married to Allen in the late 1960s] comes to see it, but so far she hasn’t. I’ve met her, and she told me some great stories about Peter.

DF: From what I understand, she absolutely adored Peter.
HJ: Oh, they were madly in love. Despite whatever happened between them, these two people were mad about each other and remained great friends their whole lives. From what everyone has told us, to see them together was to see love personified. We go to great pains to show that.

DF: Is this the first time in your career that you’ve played a real person?
HJ: Yeah, and it’s daunting. I’ve always thought that a role like that was one of the great challenges because it’s not just your imagination and the audience’s that you’re appealing to; they’ve literally got images and sounds in their heads, so it’s a fine balance between giving an impression and impersonating. Interestingly, though, many people coming to the show don’t know a lot about Peter, and that’s how I think this piece works best. It’s like the way Funny Girl is about Fanny Brice, but most people didn’t really know who she was—it’s just a great show because of the story.

DF: From what I’ve read, the director, Philip William McKinley, was concerned more about your capturing Allen’s spirit and less about his physical mannerisms.
HJ: Yeah, we really concentrated on that for the first four weeks. Then in the fifth I thought, okay, now I’ve found out who Peter is; the next thing is to put on the outer crust and the walk and the talk and all of that. And as I began doing that, I noticed the producers and the director were getting a little perturbed. Finally they said to me, "You know, it’s strange—the effect is not as strong as before. It actually works better if you give little hints of Allen and incorporate his signature moves rather than give a literal impersonation of him." And they were right. People who knew Peter came up to me after the first few performances and said, "Oh, my God, I thought that was Peter up there onstage."

DF: A great girlfriend of mine from Canada went to see the show a couple of weeks ago, and she was raving about it, saying, "I feel like I’ve just been made love to by Hugh Jackman for two and a half hours."
HJ: Now you know why I’m exhausted.

DF: Has playing a gay man made you more sensitive towards gay issues in politics?
HJ: I don’t think so. I mean, I’m in show business—I’ve always had gay friends so I’ve never really made a huge distinction based on someone’s sexuality. In fact, I deliberately tried not to play Peter too gay. I mean, he had fun. He was camp. But it was all part of his joie de vivre—he was like a kid in a candy store. And Peter was quite deliberately nonpolitical because he believed he was an entertainer and that once he crossed the line into the political arena it would hurt him. At the time I think that was very controversial: because of the Stonewall riots and everything that was going on in the gay community at the time, the gay movement was really calling for poster people. But Peter consistently refused that.

DF: Your other great success of the past few years has been playing Wolverine in the X-Men movies. Did you have any idea it was going to become the phenomenon that it has?
HJ: No. In fact, I think the studio was nervous leading up to the release. No one expected the opening we had on the first X-Men (2000). I think it really shocked a lot of people.

DF: It was your first big film break, wasn’t it?
HJ: Yeah, it gave me a career in Hollywood.

DF: Have you gone back and read any of the comic books that were the basis for the film?
HJ: Oh, yeah, especially during filming. I love them, and I love the artwork. I feel like a lot of what’s in the comic books informed how I approached the role physically. For instance, a battle in a comic book might take four pages, but you’re only shown 16 images or so of a character. In that space the reader is conveyed all the physical and emotional ups and downs of a big battle—it’s amazing how compacted it is. A lot of those images stuck in my head when I created Wolverine’s fighting style.

DF: I imagine a lot of the work you did on X-Men was done against blue screens and on soundstages, particularly with those action sequences where they have to drop you in later on. So, that insight must be helpful from a performance standpoint.
HJ: That does help, and I think having trained in theatre helps too. Usually in theatre you don’t actually get any of the physical world your character lives in to work off of.

DF: To me, X-Men is much more than your standard action-movie franchise. What do you think it is about the films that speaks to people?
HJ: For the same reason that the comic book did all those years ago. It gets to all those feelings of being a minority or being misunderstood or being different and not having anyone understand you. Here are all these people with superpowers, and yet at the same time, that power is its weakness as well, because it isolates and brings hatred and suspicion and fear and misunderstanding from other people. These characters are not just out there killing the bad guys and having a quip and a funny line. They’re all in a world of pain and misunderstanding, and how they cope with that is kind of what makes them interesting.

DF: In a way, I really see the films as being about tolerance, and how when people don’t understand something they tend to fear it. It makes me think of what’s going on in the world today, with all the conflicts stemming from difference in political views, religious views, sexuality, whatever.
HJ: Absolutely. In essence we’re talking about the same thing. On individual levels or on mass levels, when people don’t understand something they tend to fear it and want to destroy it because it’s the unknown; fear always rises out of the unknown. So the films speak on a very wide level.

DF: What can you tell us about Van Helsing?
HJ: It’s an action movie and a great adventure ride—a real blast. I play the title role of Gabriel Van Helsing, the archenemy of Dracula, and a character that appears in Bram Stoker’s original version of the Dracula story. It’s a role that’s been played on film by Anthony Hopkins and Laurence Olivier, though never as the protagonist. In our version he is younger and more adventurous. Van Helsing works for the Catholic church, getting rid of any souls they deem unredeemable, and in this film he’s sent out by the Vatican to take care of Dracula. Along the way he comes in contact with Frankenstein, the Wolf Man—all hugely iconic. Even though he’s the good guy, he’s a very enigmatic character, a bit disillusioned with what he’s doing: he enjoys the heat of battle, but there’s always the emptiness that comes with his job because in killing these demons, he’s also killing the human souls they’ve possessed. Ultimately he teams up with Kate Beckinsale’s character and the film becomes a kind of romantic adventure story. It’s a roller-coaster ride from beginning to end.

DF: How did you get involved in the project?
HJ: I’d met the film’s director, Stephen Sommers, before even reading the script, and I just thought he was awesome. He’s a great filmmaker, particularly of action movies, and an amazing guy. There aren’t many people who can handle a film as big as Van Helsing, and he has. He came up with some great character ideas and solutions for how to meld all these players so it’s not just a whole lot of battles between monsters and heroes and villains. The whole thing’s quite epic.

DF: Are there lots of special effects, like in the X-Men movies?
HJ: For Van Helsing they created amazing sets, so the blue-screen work was relatively minimal. The physical world we had to work with was unbelievable. We shot in the countryside outside Prague for three months, where they built this village. It’s still standing, since there are plans to do a second film and possibly a TV series based on the character. All the interior shots were done in L.A. because they needed huge sets. In fact, there’s one set that was so big we couldn’t find a studio anywhere in the world to fit it so we had to build it in a car park in Downey, California. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, very Indiana Jones. I always get people to visit me when I’m on set, and they’re usually pretty underwhelmed; but with this one, it was just the opposite.

DF: Making these sorts of big-budget fantasies must have been the last thing you imagined for yourself growing up in Australia. Weren’t you planning on being a journalist at one point?
HJ: Yeah, though acting was a hobby of mine my whole life. I was the youngest of five, and doing school plays or whatever was a very normal part of our household. No one was saying I should be an actor because of my talent, so I don’t think I ever really considered it; or maybe I just didn’t have the confidence to say, "This is what I’m going to do." But as I finished my degree in journalism, I began to realize that my heart wasn’t in it . There was a telling point for me after I performed in a play at another college; the course work there was half journalism and half theatre, and as I was talking to the students, I realized I’d made a mistake and should have studied there. I loved school—I’m what you’d call a chronic learner—so I decided to go on to study drama without ever giving much consideration to how far this would take me in terms of a career. But I loved it. When I graduated I thought, "Well, I’m going to give this everything I’ve got for five years. If nothing happens, I’ll start my own theater company or whatever." I’m not going to spend my whole life waiting for the phone to ring. And things just happened, one after the other.

DF: Had you seen a lot of theatre as a kid?
HJ: Oh, yeah. When I was 8 my mum moved to England, so I was always going back and forth, and I’d go to the theatre when I was there--it was wonderful. It was the perfect balance for me when I was in drama school. I studied in Perth, where you’re totally isolated and in this bubble of creative fire and risk-taking. If you’re at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, all the casting people and the agents come to see you three months into your courses, so you’re always feeling like you’re on show. But because my school was so isolated you could work out your own instincts, and creatively that can be a wonderful thing. Yet, at the same time, I was going to England and seeing these great performers, so I had a real sense of the world out there and the incredibly high standards in theatre and acting.

DF: Do you think acting represented a way for you to break out from your family, particularly as the youngest of five?
HJ: I’m sure it had something to do with attention seeking. But it was also a way of enlarging my social world. I remember seeing my older brothers and sisters off doing things and going to parties and all that, and the plays and musicals I did were a great social outlet for me.

DF: In addition to your theatre studies, I understand you’ve also done a lot of work around spiritual and philosophical issues.
HJ: Yeah, I’ve been studying at a place called the School of Practical Philosophy since 1992, and it’s become a major part of my life. It gives me a great grounding and understanding of the world around us, and it’s also been incredibly helpful to my acting. We study great philosophers, thinkers, the scriptures from the East, from the West. It’s not the kind of school where you’re actively encouraged to accept or reject any of the information, but to try it out practically in your life, as a way of inquiry. It’s all about personal experience and what helps, what doesn’t. You start with working on yourself, then widening that work to helping others around you and the community at large.

DF: What prompted your interest?
HJ: A friend turned me on to the class, and initially I thought, Wow, this is going to help my acting. And, of course, after about 15 months, there was a moment when I realized it was the other way around. Inquiry comes first, and acting is just another activity, which is a wonderful extension of that. So it happened quite slowly and naturally.

DF: Has it been helpful in dealing with the fame that followed X-Men?
HJ: I think it’s helped me to enjoy it all and not to succumb to the ups and downs so much. It’s ironic that actors, who can slip in and out of roles, often tend to take their own lives so seriously. It’s all a play, after all, and a wonderful one. I think my studies have helped me to put that into perspective and not to dismiss things as trivial or unimportant, but rather to see the roller-coaster quality as part of that inevitable play. I mean, success in this business is very much determined by public opinion, and we all know how fickle that can be.

DF: Speaking of success, I hear there’s talk of a third X-Men film. Would you want to play Wolverine again?
HJ: Yeah, it’d be interesting to see how the character progresses. They’re still working out which direction they’re going to take with the film, though, so who knows.

DF: Is there anywhere you’d like to see that character go?
HJ: Um, how about a warmer climate? You didn’t know that Wolverine was a good surfer, did you? [both laugh]