Hugh Jackman and the Art of Acting

[sohmerwood]

Isn’t that picture from the set of Someone Like You? He was dressed like that when he met Jane on a weekend morning.

[jo]

Could be! Thanks.

But I have also seen Hugh being interviewed on the street near the Imperial with an umbrella because it was raining. So, the sight of him taking care of himself when he is performing on Broadway signals how committed he is to show up for every performance.

Jo

[njr]

Apr 7, 2021 7:24:10 GMT -5 sohmerwood said:

Isn’t that picture from the set of Someone Like You? He was dressed like that when he met Jane on a weekend morning.

It looks like it to me!

Nancy

[jo]

[mamaleh]

Yes, I think it is. It's the outfit he wears when he catches Ashley Judd and Greg Kinnear together near the rack of blue shirts. That's when HJ, as Eddie, remarks about their future "matching chocolate labs."

Ellen

[jo]

Hugh Jackman movies have had very different endings/finales.

Which one is your favorite in each category ?


Dramatic Ending

*Logan ( "So this is how it feels like")
*Les Miserables ( Valjean meets the kind bishop while the fallen sings "Do you Hear The People Sing?")
*Prisoners ( Did he or did he not make it?)
*The Prestige ( Dying monologue on what motivates a performer)
*The Wolverine ( Blockbuster and CGI heaven!)
*Bad Education ( What could have been)
*Origins:Wolverine ( It ended where the next chapters will begin - nowhere)
*Australia (After a long and winding story...the Aussies are reunited)
*The Front Runner ( another "What could have been")


Happy Ending

*The Greatest Showman ( the reprise of The Greatest Show)
*Kate time travels to where/when Leopold actually lived)
*Real Steel (Charlie helps Atom to win...and Max's heart is bursting with pride)
*The Fountain ( Tommy finds "the road to awe")
*Eddie The Eagle (Eddie&Bronson triumph against all odds)
*Someone Like You ( romcom ending)

*The Boy from Oz - this is an exception (Peter goes to samba heaven in Rio!)


"Deserved what he got" Ending

*Pan (Blackbeard blown to smithereens)
*Chappie ( Chappie wins, Vincent is done!)
*Deception ( Crime does not pay)
*Scoop (Crime does not pay, even for bluebloods)

Suspense Ending

*Reminiscence ( How will it end?)


Hugh has given some unforgettable endings in the many movies he has made!  Others stick in our minds with clarity or in cobwebs.  


Jo

[jo]

"Hugh Jackman actually plays (the) character in his movies" -- very astute observation!

That is why he is now recognized for his range and versatility.

[jo]

Amazing how he can look so frightening here ...

but when his eyes "smile", his countenance changes completely

[jo]

[jo]

A compliment to Hugh Jackman!

[jo]

Just love all the praise that Hugh Jackman is getting from viewers of the REMINISCENCE trailer --

Michelle Tackett
Michelle Tackett
4 days ago
Finally, a movie I am excited about. Jackman is a generational talent. He can carry any movie.

[jo]

Because his vocal range is classified as a high baritone, Hugh is actually able to modulate his voice from deep to higher-pitched tones!

I wonder if he can sing OLD MAN RIVER??


Jo

[jo]

Is there a developing narrative on how accomplished Hugh Jackman is as an actor -

here Cinemablend compiles & provide on details most of his movies :


www.cinemablend.com/news/2568816/the-best-hugh-jackman-movies-and-how-to-watch-them

[jo]

[jo]

The first acting school that Hugh attended ( before WAAPA) --

/photo/1

[jo]

My message to Hugh (via his Instagram stories post) --

Your first "journey" as an actor! "If they could see me now!" ( as Sweet Charity would sing)

On their website --

ACA Patron
Hugh Jackman
As ACA’s Patron, Hugh Jackman welcomes you. As someone whose career training began with ACA and led him to become one of the world’s most famous and sought-after actors, Hugh continues to champion not just ACA, but the arts themselves.

He has his eye on the big picture: the arts’ massive contribution to society and Hugh knows that great training creates great actors.

Hugh graduated from ACA’s full-time acting course in 1991. He proudly accepted the role of Patron in 2007 and continues to support the vision of ACA as he follows his personal commitment to encourage and nurture future Australian artists.

“I am often asked why Australian actors are doing so well on the international stage and my first response is always that the training we receive is world-class. Certainly for me, ACA was a huge part of my development. ACA lit my passion for the craft and the fundamentals I learnt here are a huge part of the foundations I take to work with me every day.

“Returning to ACA, I was thrilled to see that the spirit, vitality, warmth and joy of the place is very much alive. I look forward to sharing my experiences with the students and also watching them grow as artists. I really have to thank all the staff at ACA for instilling in me that sense of play, risk taking and adventure that has made acting so fulfilling for me.”

He had done some amateur theater on the side, but "it was a hobby. I didn't think that I could make a living acting," as Jackman told Parade. After he graduated from the University of Technology in 1991, he enrolled in drama school full-time in a program called "The Journey" at the Actor's Centre in Sydney, because he knew he "didn't have the drive" to be a professional journalist. But he struggled a bit at first to fit in. "I was like the dunce of the class. It just wasn't coming right to me," he told Shave Magazine. "Everyone was cooler, everyone seemed more likely to succeed, everyone seemed more natural at it." But he kept at it, and according to visiting director Ross McGregor, "he was very, very focused" on learning as much as he could, providing him with a foundation and "instilling a sense of play, risk-taking, and adventure."

[njr]

^ Love that photo!! 😍❤️

[jo]

The Atlantic summarizes the quality of Hugh Jackman's career choices ( presumably as a related article to promotion for REMINISCENCE) --

SKIP TO CONTENTSite Navigation


Popular
Latest
Sign In
Subscribe
CULTURE
Why Is Hugh Jackman Still Underappreciated?
We know he can sing, rage, and plumb surprisingly dark depths. In Reminiscence, he also displays a continued embrace of his age.

By David Sims
Hugh Jackman looking at a projection in 'Reminiscence'
Warner Bros.
8:00 AM ET
SHARE
Hugh Jackman has spent a surprising amount of his career floating in water tanks. In Reminiscence, the new sci-fi noir thriller on HBO Max from writer and director Lisa Joy, the actor plays Nick Bannister, a former soldier turned private investigator of the mind, probing people’s memories while they’re submerged in a big, futuristic bath. The twist is that Bannister is addicted to revisiting his own past, taking frequent dunks to plumb the details of a romance he had with a missing woman named Mae (played by Rebecca Ferguson). It’s a clever tale, anchored by Jackman doing reliable work as an antihero haunted by his sins.

A NEW GUIDE TO LIVING THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE

The Weekly Planet brings you big ideas and vital information to help you flourish on a changing planet.

Email Address (required)
Enter your email
Sign Up
THANKS FOR SIGNING UP!

Jackman has performed this role multiple times, right down to the aquatic fixation. In his Hollywood breakout, X-Men, he played the metal-clawed Wolverine, an amnesiac who was constantly flashing back to his genesis in a military fish tank. Maybe his best-ever work was in The Prestige, as a hammy magician whose signature escape trick involves … well, you know. Every A-list actor has motifs and themes running through their career, but Jackman’s has been unusually specific.

Yet those recurring baths also chart the journey of Jackman’s varied career: The many prongs of his stardom encompass comic-book heroism, sincere song and dance, and grim dramatics. For years, Jackman did not have the clout to launch a project as weird as Reminiscence, which serves as a solid reminder that he has been one of Hollywood’s most underrated stars of the past two decades. Because he emerged with a genre-defining superhero role just as those types of films were taking over the industry, Jackman was for long periods locked in the public eye. That success has let him collaborate with more daring filmmakers, pursue passion projects, and help make original movies like Reminiscence.


Though Jackman’s first major starring role was in X-Men, he was originally plucked from the world of musical theater, where his boisterously chipper turn as Curly in a West End production of Oklahoma! had won him plaudits. So his film follow-ups to X-Men were on the gentler side: the overlooked romantic comedies Someone Like You, where he played a charming cad, and Kate & Leopold, which cast him as an English gentleman. In an earlier era, that was the typical strategy for a new male actor in demand: get him in a generic rom-com quickly, along with a generic action thriller (in this case, the nonsensical hacker flick Swordfish).

RECOMMENDED READING
Hugh Jackman in 'The Greatest Showman'
The Astonishing Success of The Greatest Showman
DAVID SIMS

Logan Is a Fitting Farewell to Hugh Jackman's Wolverine
DAVID SIMS
Shadow figure looking over black and white city scene
The End of the Fictional Cop
STEPHEN KEARSE
But even though the X-Men movies kept succeeding, Jackman took a while to find his footing as a star in his own right. He won a Tony in 2004 for his work in The Boy From Oz, but Hollywood couldn’t find a proper musical project for him until years later. He hosted the Oscars to critical acclaim in 2009, an indication of his popularity with viewers worldwide, but his only non-Wolverine box-office hit at that point had been Van Helsing, a critically reviled monster-hunter movie. While the other A-listers of his generation—George Clooney, Will Smith, Matt Damon—always found a mix of blockbusters and more serious projects, Jackman initially struggled to do the same, yet somehow retained his celebrity sheen.

Read: The shadow that’s haunting Will Smith

Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film, The Prestige, which is probably Jackman’s finest performance, seemed to finally unlock him. Jackman played Robert Angier, a talented magician prone to corner-cutting who values showmanship over craft—a clever subversion of his jazzy Broadway persona. Whereas his work as Wolverine had emphasized one-dimensional berserker rage, here Jackman was a recognizably flawed charmer who eventually strikes a devil’s bargain to achieve real fame. At the time, Nolan said that, although he was initially drawn to Jackman because of his experience as a stage performer, “he also has the great depth as an actor that hasn’t really been explored.”


The Prestige was not a massive hit. But it succeeded in teasing out Jackman’s broader potential. He worked with more challenging directors, playing the time-shifted, lovelorn protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly baffling The Fountain, and the gritty cowboy love interest in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia. In 2012, he finally landed a significant musical worthy of his talent in Les Misérables, which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Even when his projects don’t entirely land, I appreciate Jackman’s eye for tough material no matter the genre. One of his best performances of the past decade was in Denis Villeneuve’s operatically dank thriller Prisoners, but he gave his all even in projects that didn’t work, such as Joe Wright’s ridiculous Peter Pan prequel or Jason Reitman’s muddled Gary Hart biopic, The Front Runner. Jackman headlined his passion project, The Greatest Showman, an original musical about P. T. Barnum, which became a surprise word-of-mouth hit. He even shaped his later Wolverine roles into unexpectedly complex projects, working with Kate & Leopold director James Mangold on an acclaimed swan song for the character with the appreciably bloody Logan.

The key shift between the first half of his career and the latter half was that Jackman finally gained some control over his star power, and exercised it to act in movies that were obviously risky—many because of their grisly content or because they represented old-fashioned genres such as the musical. In 2020, he gave a dazzlingly vulnerable performance in Bad Education, the true story of a Long Island school superintendent who embezzled money from his district. The film emphasized Jackman’s age, casting him as a man trying to prop up his waning charm by investing in face-lifts and expensive clothes.


Viewed alongside his work as old man Wolverine in Logan, and as the troubled protagonist of Reminiscence who can’t forget his past, it’s clear that Jackman is happy to accept his age—something some of his peers, such as the eternally energetic Tom Cruise, have not. But more crucially, all of his upcoming projects are original stories from exciting filmmakers (Michael Mann, Florian Zeller, Hany Abu-Assad) that don’t have a whiff of franchise potential to them. Jackman may have emerged in Hollywood as a superhero, but he’s sticking around by embracing roles that are anything but heroic.



David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

[jo]

Aug 22, 2021 7:27:42 GMT -5 jo said:

The Atlantic summarizes the quality of Hugh Jackman's career choices ( presumably as a related article to promotion for REMINISCENCE.


www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/08/hugh-jackman-underrated-hbo-reminiscence/619857/

CULTURE

Why Is Hugh Jackman Still Underappreciated?

We know he can sing, rage, and plumb surprisingly dark depths. In Reminiscence, he also displays a continued embrace of his age.

By David Sims


Hugh Jackman has spent a surprising amount of his career floating in water tanks. In Reminiscence, the new sci-fi noir thriller on HBO Max from writer and director Lisa Joy, the actor plays Nick Bannister, a former soldier turned private investigator of the mind, probing people’s memories while they’re submerged in a big, futuristic bath. The twist is that Bannister is addicted to revisiting his own past, taking frequent dunks to plumb the details of a romance he had with a missing woman named Mae (played by Rebecca Ferguson). It’s a clever tale, anchored by Jackman doing reliable work as an antihero haunted by his sins.



Jackman has performed this role multiple times, right down to the aquatic fixation. In his Hollywood breakout, X-Men, he played the metal-clawed Wolverine, an amnesiac who was constantly flashing back to his genesis in a military fish tank. Maybe his best-ever work was in The Prestige, as a hammy magician whose signature escape trick involves … well, you know. Every A-list actor has motifs and themes running through their career, but Jackman’s has been unusually specific.

Yet those recurring baths also chart the journey of Jackman’s varied career: The many prongs of his stardom encompass comic-book heroism, sincere song and dance, and grim dramatics. For years, Jackman did not have the clout to launch a project as weird as Reminiscence, which serves as a solid reminder that he has been one of Hollywood’s most underrated stars of the past two decades. Because he emerged with a genre-defining superhero role just as those types of films were taking over the industry, Jackman was for long periods locked in the public eye. That success has let him collaborate with more daring filmmakers, pursue passion projects, and help make original movies like Reminiscence.


Though Jackman’s first major starring role was in X-Men, he was originally plucked from the world of musical theater, where his boisterously chipper turn as Curly in a West End production of Oklahoma! had won him plaudits. So his film follow-ups to X-Men were on the gentler side: the overlooked romantic comedies Someone Like You, where he played a charming cad, and Kate & Leopold, which cast him as an English gentleman. In an earlier era, that was the typical strategy for a new male actor in demand: get him in a generic rom-com quickly, along with a generic action thriller (in this case, the nonsensical hacker flick Swordfish).



But even though the X-Men movies kept succeeding, Jackman took a while to find his footing as a star in his own right. He won a Tony in 2004 for his work in The Boy From Oz, but Hollywood couldn’t find a proper musical project for him until years later. He hosted the Oscars to critical acclaim in 2009, an indication of his popularity with viewers worldwide, but his only non-Wolverine box-office hit at that point had been Van Helsing, a critically reviled monster-hunter movie. While the other A-listers of his generation—George Clooney, Will Smith, Matt Damon—always found a mix of blockbusters and more serious projects, Jackman initially struggled to do the same, yet somehow retained his celebrity sheen.



Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film, The Prestige, which is probably Jackman’s finest performance, seemed to finally unlock him. Jackman played Robert Angier, a talented magician prone to corner-cutting who values showmanship over craft—a clever subversion of his jazzy Broadway persona. Whereas his work as Wolverine had emphasized one-dimensional berserker rage, here Jackman was a recognizably flawed charmer who eventually strikes a devil’s bargain to achieve real fame. At the time, Nolan said that, although he was initially drawn to Jackman because of his experience as a stage performer, “he also has the great depth as an actor that hasn’t really been explored.”


The Prestige was not a massive hit. But it succeeded in teasing out Jackman’s broader potential. He worked with more challenging directors, playing the time-shifted, lovelorn protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly baffling The Fountain, and the gritty cowboy love interest in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia. In 2012, he finally landed a significant musical worthy of his talent in Les Misérables, which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Even when his projects don’t entirely land, I appreciate Jackman’s eye for tough material no matter the genre. One of his best performances of the past decade was in Denis Villeneuve’s operatically dank thriller Prisoners, but he gave his all even in projects that didn’t work, such as Joe Wright’s ridiculous Peter Pan prequel or Jason Reitman’s muddled Gary Hart biopic, The Front Runner. Jackman headlined his passion project, The Greatest Showman, an original musical about P. T. Barnum, which became a surprise word-of-mouth hit. He even shaped his later Wolverine roles into unexpectedly complex projects, working with Kate & Leopold director James Mangold on an acclaimed swan song for the character with the appreciably bloody Logan.

The key shift between the first half of his career and the latter half was that Jackman finally gained some control over his star power, and exercised it to act in movies that were obviously risky—many because of their grisly content or because they represented old-fashioned genres such as the musical. In 2020, he gave a dazzlingly vulnerable performance in Bad Education, the true story of a Long Island school superintendent who embezzled money from his district. The film emphasized Jackman’s age, casting him as a man trying to prop up his waning charm by investing in face-lifts and expensive clothes.


Viewed alongside his work as old man Wolverine in Logan, and as the troubled protagonist of Reminiscence who can’t forget his past, it’s clear that Jackman is happy to accept his age—something some of his peers, such as the eternally energetic Tom Cruise, have not. But more crucially, all of his upcoming projects are original stories from exciting filmmakers (Michael Mann, Florian Zeller, Hany Abu-Assad) that don’t have a whiff of franchise potential to them. Jackman may have emerged in Hollywood as a superhero, but he’s sticking around by embracing roles that are anything but heroic.



David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

[jo]

David Sims also wrote this article on Hugh Jackman's success with The Greatest Showman --

CULTURE
The Astonishing Success of The Greatest Showman
After a rocky start in theaters, the Hugh Jackman–starring circus musical has become a massive word-of-mouth hit.

By David Sims

JANUARY 23, 2018

The hottest box-office story in Hollywood right now isn’t Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which made more than $600 million in the U.S. and became the sixth biggest hit in movie history. It isn’t the surprising success of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, an unambiguous smash that has cemented the star power of Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. No, the most interesting film in last weekend’s returns was The Greatest Showman—the family-friendly original musical about P.T. Barnum starring Hugh Jackman that has now made $113 million in five weekends. It was a risky proposition of a movie that got mediocre reviews and initially generated little excitement from audiences. Now, it’s one of the largest word-of-mouth hits in Hollywood history. So what happened?



When The Greatest Showman opened in theaters on December 20, it looked dead on arrival, making only $8.8 million that weekend. But the following weekend it made $15 million, almost twice as much. That’s largely unheard of in contemporary Hollywood, where big studios films are front-loaded (opened on a massive number of screens) and the first weekend is king. The holiday season does offer a little more breathing room for movies as families have the downtime to go to the theater, but even by those standards—by any standards for a wide release, in fact—The Greatest Showman is unique.


In industry parlance, the easiest way to judge a film’s word-of-mouth is by its “multiplier,” an essential measurement of how well a release holds after its opening weekend. To get a movie’s multiplier, you simply divide its box-office totals by the amount it made in its first weekend.

A solid multiplier for a film that opens wide is around 3: Beauty and the Beast, one of 2017’s biggest hits, opened to $174 million and made $504 million over its entire run, or 2.9 times as much. A very good multiplier for a blockbuster is 4 (in 2017, Wonder Woman and Coco are good examples), which indicates an extremely positive audience reaction and a lot of return viewings.

As of now, The Greatest Showman’s multiplier is an astonishing 12.8. And it’s only going to rise; the film is still playing on 2,800 screens and its studio, Fox, is now promoting “singalong” screenings with subtitles for the musical numbers. Only one movie has ever opened wide and made a higher multiplier—Titanic, which opened to a paltry $28.6 million in 1997 and finished at $600 million. That’s a multiplier of 21, the one number even The Greatest Showman probably won’t be able to beat. But the musical has already bested every other famous blockbuster with “legs” that stuck around in theaters to everyone’s surprise after a smaller opening—movies like Avatar, There’s Something About Mary, The Sixth Sense, and The Blind Side.


It all prompts the question: Why? After all, The Greatest Showman is an easy film to criticize (and plenty of reviewers were happy to oblige). It takes its tricky subject, a man who made his fortune in the mid-19th century off his menagerie of “freaks,” and frames him as a consummate entertainer who sought only to make people happy. It posits that the various “oddities” in his museum, such as the bearded lady or the entertainer Tom Thumb, were in fact liberated by Barnum and allowed to be themselves onstage, a clunky moral at best. It’s a movie that borders on hagiography despite being centered on a man who in real life has a legacy of exploiting his workers and racial stereotyping.

But there is something undeniably lovable about The Greatest Showman, even though (or perhaps because) its historical perspective has been so radically simplified. The musical numbers, written by the Tony Award winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (La La Land, Dear Evan Hansen) are earworms, easy-listening pop songs with instant karaoke appeal (the film’s soundtrack has hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200). The ensemble offers some great performances, particularly from the Broadway veteran Keala Settle (as the bearded lady) and the up-and-coming star Zendaya (as a trapeze artist). The numbers themselves are well-choreographed and staged, not as overedited as Hollywood musicals tend to be.



And then there’s Jackman, one of the few actors who fits the old-fashioned, Golden Age of Hollywood movie-star mold. He can sing, he can dance, but he can also play a musclebound brute if necessary, or emote in a serious drama. The Greatest Showman was an $84 million original musical that Jackman worked to shepherd to screen. He even hand-picked the visual-effects supervisor Michael Gracey, who had directed him in a Lipton commercial, to make his feature debut with the film. After that, it still took years to reach theaters while Jackman found a studio that would take a chance on it (the production was first announced in 2009).


The effort Jackman put into getting The Greatest Showman made comes through in the manic gleefulness of his performance. It’s rare that a studio will back a big-budget movie simply because an actor is pushing for it—these days, an established franchise or brand name is necessary—but Jackman succeeded, and the film’s impressive run is evidence of his star power. Almost all of 2017’s biggest hits were sequels, remakes, or children’s films, with Jackman’s Logan (the tenth X-Men movie) among them. The Greatest Showman was a bigger gamble that’s paid off for Fox.

Will another studio approve a film as risky in the future? Given that Fox is in the process of being acquired by the far more cautious Disney, there’s less chance of an expensive, original feature like The Greatest Showman getting greenlit again. But nearly five weeks in, it hasn’t lost its hold on moviegoers. Most blockbusters feel like they’ve been designed by committee, perfectly balanced by focus groups and audience tests to attract the widest swath of viewers. The Greatest Showman, a passion project suffused with old-fashioned silliness, stands out from that crowd—and it’s an unexpected triumph that studios would do well to pay attention to.


David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.[/]

[jo]

David Sims also wrote an article on LOGAN as a fitting farewell to the saga of Wolverine.

Sorry, a subscription wall limited my access to 2 articles.

[jo]

This is the second major writeup reviewing Hugh Jackman's body of work, focusing on his post-Wolverine film portfolio.

www.filmstories.co.uk/features/exploring-hugh-jackmans-post-wolverine-roles/

Exploring Hugh Jackman’s post-Wolverine roles

26th August 2021 | by Mark Harrison | 1 Comment


It’s been almost five years since Logan and Hugh Jackman’s last turn in the X-Men franchise – we take a look at his cinematic life after Wolverine.

At some point in the next decade or so, Marvel Studios is going to face its biggest challenge yet – recasting Wolverine. It’s not merely that Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of Logan in the X-Men movies is somehow definitive, but that it was prevalent for longer than any other version of any other comic-book character. In the 17 years Jackman played the part, we went through three Peter Parkers, three Bruce Banners, and (thanks to prequels and time-hopping shenanigans) at least two versions of almost every other X-Man in the same franchise as well.

While 2017’s Logan brought a permanent end to that run, (touch wood) Jackman remains the best there is at what he did. But as the longest-serving actor to play the same comic-book-movie role in the modern era, he’s firmly established his version of that character, which isn’t necessarily faithful to the stockier version from the comics. With the wildly fluctuating quality of that franchise, it’s to his credit that he’s good in all of them, irrespective of the quality of the film he happens to be in.



Jackman’s versatility often goes underappreciated, even though he got to show that off within the franchise better than most of his X-Men co-stars. And so, his post-Marvel roles give the impression of an actor branching out again. This feature isn’t an exhaustive rundown of his recent work, (which also includes Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner and a voice role in Laika’s delightful animation Missing Link) but rather an examination of three specific projects that have seen him move away from his most famous role.

It’s also worth noting that he was no slouch in between X-entries either. Jackman still found time to act in fare as varied as Swordfish, The Fountain, The Prestige, Real Steel, Prisoners, Chappie, and Eddie The Eagle, and also earned his first Oscar nomination for playing Jean Valjean in 2012’s Les Misérables. Given his origins in musical theatre, it’s a shame he’s not had more movie musical roles, but then the number of movie musicals he has starred in has doubled since he retracted his adamantium claws for good…



The Greatest Showman (2017)


“It’s everything you ever want, it’s everything you ever need, and it’s here right in front of you…”

While Jackman’s turn as P.T. Barnum was significant as his very next role after Logan, it was also a project he was working on for more than half of his tenure in the X-Men movies. The notion of Jackman playing Barnum went as far back as his turn hosting the Oscars in 2009, when producers Laurence Mark and Bill Condon remarked upon his showmanship during rehearsals.

The opening musical number of that ceremony was probably the most widely-seen exposure of Jackman’s singing and performing prowess Hollywood had offered him – his all-singing all-dancing recap of the year’s biggest films (“Ohhh, Nixon!”) was so good that it went on to win a television Emmy itself.

Meanwhile, when Jackman showed interest in playing Barnum, another writer for that year’s ceremony, Jenny Bicks, set about writing The Greatest Showman with Condon. Songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul were tasked with writing the original soundtrack for the film, which cleans up Barnum’s act by having him bring together “unique” people at a totally un-exploitative circus, with no horrible shit underpinning any of this, no siree bob.

The film took another eight years to make it to cinemas, and we’ve covered the full story of its long road to a greenlight from 20th Century Fox in a previous episode of the Film Stories podcast, which you can listen to right here…



Focusing on the film itself, which is already practically cemented as one of the like-it-or-lump-it popular faves of the 2010s, it’s unquestionably elevated by Jackman’s star power and commitment to the part. With its rose-coloured portrayal of Barnum as a champion of the outcast, rather than the real-life proponent of human zoos, the film makes it harder to like him than it really ought to be on the sheer gusto of his performance.

It would be like if, a century from now, they made a musical about an innovative breakfast TV presenter who’s clever and righteous and popular and persistent even in the face of his haters. There’s no reason you can’t make a great musical out of that premise, but if you actually call your hero Piers Morgan, there’s gonna be baggage.

The point is, if you’re gonna fictionalise the character anyway, they could have made a totally unproblematic film with a Barnum-like figure without taking on the baggage of Barnum himself. Either way, it hasn’t made a lick of difference to the film’s audience reception.

Despite the inevitably sniffy reviews, The Greatest Showman was a $435-million hit at the worldwide box office and it’s already a staple of singalong screenings and the drive-in events that sprung up during last year’s cinema closures.

If, like me, you didn’t warm to this one as much, it’s only a shame that we’re still waiting for the five or six other Hugh Jackman-fronted musicals that should have been greenlit when this one did well. A sequel was reportedly in development in 2019, around the time Jackman went on a world tour singing songs from the film and various Broadway shows, but that’s one of the projects rendered moot by Disney’s acquisition of Fox the same year, and there have been few developments on the original movie musical front since then.



Bad Education (2019)


“It’s not perfect. But it works. What we have here works. I hope we can keep it that way.”

On the more dramatic side of things, Jackman went on to play devoted school superintendent Frank Tassone in 2019’s Bad Education. Not to be confused with either the Pedro Almodóvar film or the movie spin-off of that BBC Three sitcom, this movie was made for HBO in the US, and it came over the pond as a Sky Cinema and NOW TV exclusive during last year’s lockdown.

Based on the true story of a US public school scandal, the film starts with Frank chatting merrily away to student journalist Kayla (Geraldine Viswanathan) about how he and his colleagues are working hard to make their school the best in the country. As a great teacher and top bloke, he advises Kayla to treat her feature on an expensive new infrastructure project as any top reporter would. Unfortunately for Frank and his colleagues, she takes his grinning encouragement to heart.

Appreciating that this one’s a bit of a hidden gem, we don’t want to give away too much of the film’s story or the true events that inspired it, but this is definitely one to seek out if you haven’t seen it already.

Over the course of the drama, Thoroughbreds director Cory Finley gives the American school system the Scorsese treatment, to arresting and quietly devastating effect. As well as a clever, beguiling script by Robert Kolker and Mike Makowsky, the film boasts great supporting turns from Viswanathan, Allison Janney, and Ray Romano.

In the centre of it all, Jackman is on tremendous form. The star dabbled in this territory after The Greatest Showman with his role in Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner, as disgraced Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart.

In that film, the portrayal of a good man stuck on a turning point in the news coverage of politicians’ personal lives plays on Jackman’s established likeability and screen presence. By contrast, Bad Education slowly turns up the heat on him, melting that persuasive persona away and revealing the flawed character beneath over the course of its running time.

Had this been an eligible theatrical release, it’s not a stretch to say this might have earned Jackman another Oscar nomination. It’s a terrific role that exercises his full range, from sparkling composure to indignation and humiliation, and he plays it perfectly.



Reminiscence (2021)


“No such thing as a happy ending. All endings are sad. Especially if the story was happy.”

Currently playing in cinemas, Jackman’s latest leading role is in Reminiscence, a sci-fi neo-noir about a man who helps his clientele relive their memories using advanced technology, and his quest to find Mae, (The Greatest Showman’s Rebecca Ferguson again) a singer and waitress who has mysteriously disappeared. Written and directed by Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, the film is as straight-faced a noir story as we’ve seen inside a cinema for some time now.

In a nice “not-so-distant future” twist, we learn that global warming has turned Miami into a sunken city and high temperatures have forced the population into nocturnal living. It’s a unique backdrop for a mystery thriller that otherwise embraces all the tropes of its genre, from femme fatales to corrupt elites. Your mileage may vary on how effectively it evokes those conventions, but it does so knowingly, and either way, this is handsomely made, enjoyable popcorn fare.

With a title like Reminiscence, we can’t avoid talking about some of the other films to which this one owes a creative debt. These range from Inception, a film which also has military technology being used as a thriller plot device, to Blade Runner, which famously had a lot of narration explaining things in its theatrical cut.

Mercifully, Jackman sounds livelier than Harrison Ford does in that studio-mandated voiceover. Heck, if he did some pulp detective audiobooks, I’d listen to them, but more importantly, it befits a film that unironically has its tortured male protagonist talking over it.

My objection to the generally negative response for this one (it’s flagging around the 38% mark on Rotten Tomatoes) is that it would be okay if more films tried to be clever. If Reminiscence were the bog-standard norm for this kind of sci-fi thriller, that would be one thing, but it’s very much the sort of mid-range original sci-fi movie that’s gone away in the era of massive tentpoles being planted every couple of weeks. Frankly, we could stand to have a couple more like this.

Like The Greatest Showman, it’s the sort of film that’s not happening without a star like Jackman on board. Also like The Greatest Showman, I completely understand some viewers not getting as much out of Reminiscence as others, but as per usual, we can likely all agree that the lead performance is one of the best things about it.

Next to his other roles, it’s more like The Prestige than any film he’s made since The Prestige, and sequences of him submerged in a tank of water or obsessing over finding out what he needs to know recall Robert Angier as much as Logan/Wolverine. While he’s versatile enough to keep it from becoming samey, Jackman has this powerful thread of melancholy running through many of his performances and here, it pulls together a film about obsessive nostalgia quite nicely.



What’s next?

The next film we’ll see Jackman in is The Son, Florian Zeller’s (unrelated) follow-up to this year’s Oscar contender The Father, and he’s also been attached to leading roles in Michael Mann’s Enzo Ferrari biopic and a biblical epic about Paul the apostle.

There are continuous rumours that Jackman may return to Marvel movies in some way, but despite persistent cameos in Fox’s X-Men spin-offs via archive footage from other movies, Logan is as emphatic a full stop as you ever get on a modern comic-book movie performance, so we’re sceptical about him ever unsheathing those claws again.

By working between superhero movies and other projects all the way, the post-Wolverine Jackman is also a post-movie-star Jackman, and while it’s concepts and properties that launch projects rather than actors nowadays, his choices since Logan exhibit what may not have been obvious at the time he first rose to stardom – that he really can do it all.

And hey, while it remains an abject failure of Hollywood that casting agents have given James Corden more big movie musical roles than Jackman, he’s got the chops without singing and dancing. Looking back at that Oscars opener though, it would be a shame if we didn’t get to see more of him doing this sort of thing on screen…

(Clip of 2009 Oscars Opening Number)

Somehow the lack of mention of his theatrical portfolio does not give a complete picture of his range.

I submitted the following comment :

Jo • 7 minutes ago
After filming The Son, he goes back to the stage, headlining the revival of the musical The Music Man on Broadway. His acting/performing portfolio includes stints in the theatre. He was in the London OKLAHOMA! revival before Wolverine came along. Early in his Hollywood career, he shifted back to Broadway, winning a TONY for The Boy From Oz. Two dramatic plays also featured in his theatrical runs: a two-hander play A Steady Rain with Daniel Craig about 2 rogue Chicago cops...and a Broadway transfer of Jez Buttterworth's The River. The Music Man is a well-loved musical which focuses on a charismatic character in a slice of Americana ( most famous songs are" 76 Trombones" & " 'Til There Was You"). Hugh Jackman's acting and performing portfolio has been marked by his presence in both films and the stage.

[jo]

Maybe someday, Hugh could reprise one of Gregory Peck's memorable portrayals!

[jo]

[jo]

Translated from German by Google
If we ask ourselves in the future why Viola Davis suddenly records an album or why Hugh Jackman suddenly plays an ambitious biopic, then it could be because of this.

Putting Hugh Jackman's later career involvement in dramas and biopics is a natural progression & reflects his maturing in other important artistic fields as he grows older. He is fully trained in dramatic theatre and biopic dramas are well along his talent, range& training. He deserve accolades for Bad Education, The Front Runner & The Greatest Showman.

It is not the same as actors trying win the rare EGOT by reading a book ( which Grammy allows as a qualified field)

Triple-threat talents have the best shot at attaining the rare EGOT stature. In Hugh's case, he has won his awards in different artistic fields ( Tony for musical theatre, Emmy for hosting the Tonys, Grammy as principal soloist fo Greatest Showman). His Oscar will hopefully come soon in some future projects, not necessarily only in biopic dramas!

Jo