休·杰克曼（《首映》）

Cover Story: Hugh Jackman
X-Men's Wolverine is shedding his fur and taking the lead in both The Prestige and The Fountain.

By Johanna Schneller

(This feature was originally published in the September 2006 issue of Premiere.)

At some point between appetizers and dinner, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson got to singing show tunes. They were with friends, including Harvey Weinstein, at the Ivy in London, after a long day on the set of The Prestige, writer-director Christopher Nolan's new drama about rival magicians in Victorian England. He plays a flashy magician; she's his assistant and love interest. (Christian Bale—who starred in Batman Begins for Nolan—is his more somber nemesis.) Jackman and Johansson started on Oklahoma!, then moved on to Guys and Dolls and Carousel. She taught him a few numbers from Damn Yankees. He sang selections from The Boy From Oz, the musical about Peter Allen for which he'd won a Tony on Broadway (and which he is currently reprising on an Australian tour). “I'm a show tunes-loving kind of girl, and Hugh has a beautiful voice,” Johansson says. “He has this boyish infectiousness. Harvey told me later that we sang for two hours.” She does a growly Weinstein imitation: “ 'Scarlett, you were singing so much, we never got dessert.' ” It's official: At 37, Hugh Jackman is having his life-of-the-party moment. He's long seemed biologically destined to be a star. Six three, with hair as thick as fudge, he has sleek features and a physique to make a sculptor swoon. Workwise, he can do anything. “I was floored by him in The Boy From Oz,” says writer-director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream). “He exploded on the stage. Hugh Jackman and his talent—there are no boundaries to it. There aren't many guys in history who could sing, dance, act, and are beautiful to look at, but he's definitely one of them.” Jackman's made a name for himself sporting adamantium claws and killer sideburns as Wolverine in three X-Men films and as the monster-slaying title character in 2004's Van Helsing. But in dramas and romantic comedies, he has held back, taken supporting roles—to Ashley Judd in Someone Like You, Meg Ryan in Kate & Leopold, and John Travolta in Swordfish.

This fall, the modest actor finally seems to be mutating into leading-manhood. “A couple years back, when X2 came out, my agent said, 'Okay, now's the time to make your list of directors, and I'm going to ring every one of them,' ” Jackman says, in a sharp Aussie accent that's sexier than the American and British voices he's done onscreen. The directors called back: Woody Allen cast him as a devilish aristocrat opposite Johansson's cub reporter in Scoop. Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins) signed him on as The Prestige's flamboyant illusionist, again opposite Johansson. “The part fits Hugh like a glove,” Nolan says. “He's not only a great movie actor, but also a wonderful stage performer, and his character has to be both. He gets to show a side of himself that the public hasn't seen on film before.”

And Aronofsky gave Jackman his most challenging role to date, as a man who fights for the life of his lover through three different time periods—16th-century Spain, the modern day, and the 26th century—in the heady, multilayered drama The Fountain. The making of that film had its own Hollywood ending. Aronofsky began working on it after Requiem; five years ago, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett signed on. But Pitt dropped out in 2002 and the financing crumbled without him, and Aronofsky spent fruitless months trying to get the story out of his head. Eventually he rewrote it to fit a $35 million budget, and was shopping for a lead actor when a friend dragged him to see Jackman on Broadway. (Even more fortuitously for Aronofsky, he replaced Blanchett with his girlfriend Rachel Weisz; the night he showed her the finished film, she went into labor with their baby.)

Jackman's momentum shows no sign of waning. He's lent his voice to two animated features, Flushed Away and Happy Feet. He'll play a cattle driver opposite Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann's as-yet-untitled Australian epic (he replaced Russell Crowe on that one). And this fall he'll be in New York shooting a thriller, The Tourist, in which he's the villain. It will be the first film made by Jackman's production company, called Seed Productions, which also has a Wolverine prequel in the works.

In June, just after finishing a press tour of Asia for X-Men: The Last Stand, and two days before he attended Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's wedding, Jackman was back in Australia with his wife of ten years, Deborra-Lee Furness, an actress, a director, and a partner in Seed. He did this phone interview sitting in his study in a rented house in Sydney, watching rain clouds blow over Tamerama Beach. Their 11-month-old daughter, Ava, was napping; their six-year-old son, Oscar, was heard asking his dad, “What on earth are you up to?” Happily for Jackman, it's a long answer.

Premiere: In the most futuristic scenes in The Fountain, you're floating in a biosphere bubble in deep space, talking to a tree, and your head is completely shaved. What was that like?
I used to be called Pea Head at school. The moment I saw myself, I started laughing hysterically. All I could see were my mates going, “Pea Head! Pea Head!” I'd always dreamed of shaving it, because I love swimming, and with my head shaved, it was the most exquisite feeling.

No pangs of vanity?
Never. I like experimenting. I also had to shave my legs, chest, and arms. After the first couple of days, it became a real pain: wrists, underarms, everything.

But we hardly see your skin.
I know, but we weren't sure when we might, so I had to be ready.

How did your son like you bald?
He was pretty freaked out. I told him beforehand, “If you want, you can cut your hair off with me.” He thought that was a great idea—until he saw me. Now he's obsessed with growing his hair long and never having it cut.

And shaving your head was minor compared with other things you did in that film—I think you played every possible emotion.
I haven't before, and I doubt I'll ever again, have an opportunity to do so many different things in one movie. Just to give you an example of Darren's commitment, the whole year I was on Broadway, we would meet once or twice a week. He would come with me to do research, he would send me books, I was doing tai chi, yoga. I had to do the lotus position in a scene; it took me about 14 months to get there.

What part of the research interested you most?
I watched surgeons remove a brain tumor from a woman. They told me she was going to die anyway, they were just trying to extend her life. What I didn't realize is they'd have her awake. They had her doing these video games the whole time, so they could make choices as to when to stop cutting out the tumor. The moment I met her—she had blond hair just like my wife—my blood literally went cold. All I could think of was my wife on that table. As much as I'd read the script and theorized and practiced philosophy, I knew in that moment that I was so not ready for death. It was probably the most scared I'd ever been. I remember going all cold. I couldn't look at her for a while. Then they started operating, and I cut my vision to just the brain so it became more clinical. But it certainly moved me, made me appreciate what I have in my life so much more.

What was the hardest scene to film?
The scene in space where my character finally admits, “I'm scared.” I had to break down. We started first thing in the morning, and right up till lunchtime, I was just crying. Darren would stop shooting, and I couldn't stop crying. It was late in the film; I was already exhausted, almost broken. When he called, “Lunch,” I thought, “Thank God.” I didn't even know if I could walk to my trailer. I literally lay down on the floor, couldn't eat. At the end of lunch, Darren said, “Okay, mate, we're picking up where we left off.” I almost threw up. [laughs] The first take after lunch is the one that's in the movie. What Darren wanted was, here is a conquistador, a guy who will fight and fight no matter what the odds, and here's the one point he admits, “I don't know if I can do it.” Darren needed to see in my face that utter exhaustion. Well, there was no acting required. There are moments in this movie that I'm uncomfortable watching myself.

Why?
I felt emotionally as naked as I ever have been, and it happens to be on film. But I've got to tell you, I loved it. I couldn't have done any more, I don't think. And Darren was there every step of the way—not at a monitor, right by the camera.

He doesn't watch through a monitor?
Well, he does in terms of setting up the camera. God, talk about finicky. Every shot is a piece of art. He's obsessed with symmetry. I think a couple of times Matthew Libatique, the DP, wanted to head-butt Darren. We were shooting one scene in a doctor's office, and Darren kept saying, “It's wrong, it's wrong.” It turned out that one of the X-ray screens was 1.5 percent off being level. No one else could see it. But Darren would not have been able to look at that in dailies, let alone in the movie. He would have dropped the shot. So he would watch things in the monitor, but when it came to the meat of the story, he was always right there.

Was that awkward during your love scenes with his girlfriend?
When Rachel and I were making out in the bath, she was naked, and Darren was sitting on an apple box next to the camera, four feet away from us. The scene as written just said we kiss, she pulls me into the bath, and it's clear we're about to make love. So she pulls me in, and we're kissing, kissing, Darren's right there, we're kissing, kissing. Eventually Rachel took off my shirt, we're kissing some more, I'm on top of her. Finally I hear Darren going, “Take his pants off!” [laughs] So no, it was never a worry for me. Darren was at pains to make me know that the film would come first; he would never make me feel like the third wheel, and I never did.

The movie is so romantic, it's almost like he wrote it to call her to him.
To me, it's a love story. She looks so beautiful in that film. I think she's extraordinary, so fantastic and vulnerable. And how she conveys that sense of accepting her death. That's a very difficult thing to play. None of us have really had to face it. It's so affecting. It goes back to that original quote in the movie about Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden because they ate from the tree of knowledge, and God hiding the tree of life. The tree of knowledge is also known as the tree of good and evil. Basically, duality. So the moment Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge, or good and evil, humans started to experience life as we all experience it now, which is life and death, poor and wealthy, pain and pleasure, good and evil. We live in a world of duality. Husband, wife, we relate everything. And much of our lives are spent not wanting to die, be poor, experience pain. It's what the movie's about.

I think the message of that Bible quote is that there is a place . . . the garden of Eden is available to everybody now, and it's a place beyond duality. Where you can recognize that there is an essential truth to life that exists beyond good/evil. And that is knowledge and God. I think occasionally all of us experience that. It may happen on a Tuesday afternoon, when all of a sudden everything feels fine, for no particular reason. Nothing's really happened, but you feel a sense of bliss.

I studied philosophy myself. Before the myth of the Garden of Eden and eating the fruit, the moment you take a bite of that apple, and you choose to live life in duality, where God is separate from you, the journey we have in life is to get back to that unity, rather than duality. So what Rachel's character realizes in the end, [is] that in a way there is no death, in the same way there is no birth—we exist for all time. Always. So she's not afraid of it, nor is she denying it. In that way, the love story exists beyond time.

True love is not actually bound by our bodies or the length of time we're alive. Love exists always. The gift of falling in love, we recognize the truth: We're all unified. It happens to us rarely in life, but it probably most often happens when we fall in love. Or when you have a child. They can cling all over you, and you're amazingly in love.

The Fountain was originally to star Brad Pitt. You got the part in the next Luhrmann film after Russell Crowe dropped out. Dougray Scott was supposed to play Wolverine, until he got held up on Mission: Impossible 2. How do you feel about being cast second?
I never cared about that. I know enough about the business to know that by the time a movie comes to me, there have been at least five or six other names before me. When I started, there were probably 30 other names before me. But you don't have to be the first-round draft pick to feel you deserve the role. You need to have the confidence in yourself that you're the right person for the part. Otherwise, you live a very precarious, vulnerable life. I spent four years training to be an actor precisely for that reason. When I was going to drama school, I turned down a very high-profile TV job because I thought, “I don't yet feel I deserve an audition at the Royal Shakespeare Company or in every Hollywood movie.” Where by the time I graduated, I felt I did. As an actor, that's all that I have control over—only my belief that I should get the role.

Is that why you're beginning to produce as well as act?
Absolutely. I've always believed that the worst position for an actor to be in is that victim role of waiting for the phone call.

How involved will you be in producing?
I'm involved in terms of script, casting, choosing directors. At the moment, we're casting the lead in The Tourist, so I make a lot of the phone calls. If you can be passionate enough to ring friends—because most of the people I'm ringing I kind of know now—if you can say, “I think this is fantastic, I'm not just using up a favor,” then that's a good touchstone for me.

Who are you calling?
[laughs] I know what it's like when my name is bandied about on projects I don't end up doing. So I'll just say, high-profile actors. I should know soon.

What attracted you to The Prestige?
It's set in the early 1900s, in the world of magic. Back then, as you probably know from Houdini, they were rock stars. So the stakes got ever higher among magicians to wow crowds and make them believe. Christian and I become competitive to the point where we try to sabotage each other's acts and to kill each other.

My character is a showman first. He's fully aware that what he's doing is entertaining people, and will do whatever he can to do it better than anybody else. Christian's character will never repeat a trick. He thinks that insults the art of magic; once you have a trick perfected, you move on and keep getting better. He's a better magician ultimately than my character, who's a better showman. So I suppose my experience onstage, or hosting the Tony awards, was definitely a part of the way I played the character. I thought there had to be a true ease with the audience. Magicians came as the ultimate act in a vaudeville program; it was an interactive crowd anyway. So by the time the magician came out, he had to interact with the audience, hold them in the palm of his hand. So I tried to use as much as I could of my experience.

The script is brilliant. It has the same three-act structure as a magic trick. The third act, the “Ah!” moment, is called the prestige. You see how these tricks were done, and it was a brutal world.

Brutal how?
Of course there is no such thing as magic, so sometimes there was brutality to make these tricks appear real. Plus, they're an odd group of people; their codes of secrecy, mixed with showmanship—it's a very potent combination.

Sounds like a film set.
Back then they had “ingénieurs” who were the architects behind the scenes of the magic tricks, and I remember thinking as we shot, “All the people who work on film sets and do special effects, they're the ingénieurs of today.” And the stakes are equally high, and the demand is just as great.

Did you learn any good tricks?
I worked with Ricky Jay, who's in the film, and a guy called Michael Weber; they have a company together. Both Christian and I were learning tricks for the camera, so we could cheat them. We asked them to teach us a full trick, but they do everything on a need-to-know basis. I never got them to crack. Luckily, they had to go off to another commitment, so the production brought in a young magician who wanted to be an actor. He was ready to sell all his tricks down the river. [laughs] So he taught me several card tricks.

Do you and Christian have any action scenes?
There's a great scene where something catastrophic happens onstage, and both of us are right there, and neither of us does anything. I can't tell you what happens, but even a mildly heroic person would step in and do something. I thought, “Here are Batman and Wolverine together, and both of us are standing back.” [laughs]

How does Christopher Nolan work?
Chris is incredibly intelligent, smart, collaborative, calm. His is a very low-maintenance set, no big trailers. He works fast, he doesn't do a lot of takes. You do a lot of acting every day in a Chris Nolan movie, as opposed to waiting to act. He told me he was thrilled to get back to this size of filmmaking after doing Batman Begins, because big studio movies end up being Goliath-like oxen, slow to move.

I remember on X-Men 3, leaving the Alcatraz set and walking out into the circus [the cluster of trailers in the parking lot], and I thought, “The circus is bigger than the set.” I counted 44 trailers. I remember thinking, “This is ridiculous.” I rang my lawyer, who was negotiating The Prestige, and I said, “I don't want a big trailer.” I ended up getting what they call a half-banger, where you share a trailer with someone else. I talked to Chris a little bit about this: What you miss on a huge film is the focus and attention on the work. There are four times the people who need to be there, and there's a culture of waste. After a while, it starts to make you feel like you've eaten too much dessert. It feels a bit sickening.

So as a producer on Wolverine, what kind of set would you like?
I would love the atmosphere to be more like an independent movie. Okay, the craft service isn't as big, there's not La-Z-Boy chairs for everyone on set. On X-Men 2, someone was flown up solely to make blended iced coffee-bean drinks. It's all gone a bit too far. I understand that people are busy and they need to be taken care of so they can concentrate on their work. But it seems to me that people at times end up concentrating on their lifestyle—whether their PlayStation 2 is plugged into their trailer—more than their work.

Why do you want to play Wolverine again?
I have this gut feeling that we can make a phenomenal movie about what I think is a gift of a character. I feel that audiences have never been given the full picture about this guy. When I was doing X-Men, I watched Road Warrior incessantly. Mel Gibson has maybe 11 lines of dialogue. Yet not only do you understand everything that's going on inside of him, but you feel for him. It's a brilliant character piece. That's how I see Wolverine. It will probably be a prequel. I think the character has moved on too much now, we need to go back to his origins. It doesn't need to be as big a movie as X3, it doesn't need to have as many special effects. David Benioff, who is one of the great writers in Hollywood, is finishing his third draft, and what he's come up with is so fantastic. Look, I'm sure some people will think that I'm cashing in, or that it's really X4 in disguise. But I know that if the movie is as good as what I'm seeing right now, people will see that this is not a cynical, commercial decision; it really is out of a genuine interest to fully realize this character, and I think the fans deserve that.

What intrigues you about Wolverine?
There's an inherent mystery about him. What is he? Is he all human, or part animal? What is his past? He has an inkling that it's checkered, but he doesn't know. He lives with this dislocation, no connection to anybody, any place, any time; he doesn't even know how old he is. The first Greek play I did at drama school was The Bacchae, this fantastic myth about a king who wanted to make life as controlled as possible. But [the god Bacchus] ends up luring all the women up a hill, including the king's mother, where they have wild orgies. One night, the king sits in a tree and watches in horror, and they see him; they attack him and devour him. They rip him up and eat him. It's an allegory of how in life, it's good to be disciplined and ordered, but there's always an element of chaos. And if we deny that in ourselves, then we don't fully live.

I always saw Wolverine like that. There's a wildness to him that he doesn't fully understand. What I want to see in this movie is that when he fights, there's almost a pure joy in his eyes. As well as being afraid of it at the same time. I see an epic nature to this character and what he represents in terms of human nature. It seems to me that finding the balance of being a natural human being is ever tougher in our modern world. So you hear those ridiculous stories about men going into the forest in loincloths and chanting. They're absolutely bored with their lives, and out of touch with their instincts. You just have to go on the subway, there seem to be a lot of people walking around half-dead.

Sounds like you work out that stuff on your job.
Oh, yeah. When my first vocal coach said to me, “Breathe in,” I sucked my belly in and my chest went out. He just started laughing at me. I didn't even know how to breathe! I remember thinking, “Everybody should do a year of drama school. It would make their lives so much fuller.” You get to know so much about yourself, even if you're the shyest person in the world. I'm sure I was being egocentric; you could find out those things if you were taught properly in whatever field. But acting to me is life learning.

Whose career would you like to have?
The best version of it? A mixture of theater and film, a kind of Cary Grant leading man, maybe Gregory Peck. They're the ones I looked up to. Then all of a sudden the first movie I had out, I was Wolverine. It turned out to be a stroke of luck, because I think everything else I did, I was the underdog. People were thinking, “This is Wolverine, what can he do?” But I did then have to make sure that I tried to do different things. In the last two years, it feels to me that the kinds of films I've always wanted to do are now matched up with the fact that I'm on the radar of the directors that I want to work with. Whereas previously I wasn't. In fact, I'd met Darren a few years ago at a party. I'd forgotten this; he reminded me while we were filming. I'd said to him, “One day I really want to work with you.” He remembers thinking, “Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.” [big laugh] So there you go.