Hugh ... On Cue
This lucky leading man is dressed for success and has much to be thankful for, including having Nicole Kidman as his co-star in the epic movie Australia.
BY MARK SEAL
BLACK & WHITE PHOTOS BY
JAMES HOUSTON
The role was to go to Russell Crowe, but for reasons that included pay, availability, and the other forces that keep nascent movie projects bouncing between leading men, the script finally went to the Australian actor Hugh Jackman.
Jackman was in Los Angeles when he got a call from Baz Luhrmann, the director of Moulin Rouge, whose next project, Australia, would be a sweeping Gone With the Wind meets The African Queen epic set in the hellish heat of the Australian Outback. Luhrmann had already signed Nicole Kidman to play Lady Sarah Ashley, the film’s British aristocratic cattle owner who journeys to Australia to confront her husband, who, she believes, fell into an affair while selling his cattle station (roughly the size of Belgium). Luhrmann was in the 11th hour of casting the “Drover,” a droll yet dynamic Aussie cowboy who drives Lady Ashley and the cattle she inherits across the barren terrain amid the bombs of World War II. The director needed a leading man, “a young Clint Eastwood,” someone “excellent with a cattle whip,” who had “the ability to pick up a Nicole Kidman, throw her on the bed, and ravish her with believability,” he would later tell The New York Times.
“I might have a role for you,” Hugh Jackman remembered Baz Luhrmann telling him in their first phone call. “We were talking and very sort of vague in a way, but I was just so excited about what was obviously shaping up to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Not only as a fellow Australian but just as an actor in general. The opportunity doesn’t come around very often, and I could feel that when Baz was talking. Plus Baz just being Baz, I mean, I would queue up to be in any movie that he was in, let alone a movie like this, so when things didn’t work out with Russell, that’s when he rang me and offered me the role that Russell was going to do and, of course, I absolutely leapt at it.”
“I was shooting a movie called The Prestige,” he continued, explaining why he was in L.A., instead of his home in Sydney, when the call came for the film that would change both his life and his career, moving him from A-List Actor to Leading Man With Oscar Potential. “Not long after speaking with Baz, and of course very excited about it, I had a Super Bowl party. Nicole came around -- she was in town as well -- and I remember her asking me, ‘Baz tells me you are talking about the movie. You going to do it?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And I told her I was so excited about it, but I hadn’t read the lines. She said she hadn’t read it, either.”
“You haven’t read anything?” Jackman said he asked Kidman incredulously.
“No,” she said, adding, “Come on, this is Baz. Just sign on. Don’t worry about it.”
“I BELIEVE ROLES FIND PEOPLE, and Hugh made the Drover his own,” Nicole Kidman told me. “The Drover became Hugh and Hugh became the Drover. He’s gorgeous and compelling in the role.” While Jackman once said, “I don’t set goals in life … we limit ourselves with goals,” his life has been an instance of roles finding him with increasing happenstance, last-minute replacements, and happenings that propelled him to the cusp of mega-stardom, where he finds himself today.
He was calling from his hometown of Sydney, where he was sitting in a makeup chair, having his beard trimmed for Australia, when he recounted his amazing rise. He wasn’t even going to be an actor. He was a journalism student, planning to go into radio, “travel the world, send back stories,” Jackman said. Then, during his last college semester, “to make up a couple of units to pass, I picked drama. Everyone told me that with drama, you just turn out and you read a few plays -- no assignment, no exams.”
It went as mindless as planned until the drama professor decided to stage a play. Jackman was cast in the leading role. After the play toured Australia, he forgot about radio, enrolled in drama school, and became a starving actor. Literally. “I had no money,” he said. “I was an acting student, a bum.”
He did musical theater in London, including Oklahoma. He loved “the actors of old,” like Cary Grant and Gregory Peck, admired their style, their “command of not only their voice, but their body.” But few Cary Grant roles were around, especially for a skinny actor unknown outside of the work he did in Australian film, TV, and theater. “I made a five-year contract with myself,” he said. “I thought if after five years, it’s not working out, no problem, we go to journalism.” Then, as the five years began running out, fate found him in 2000 in the role of Wolverine, a comic book character in a movie called X-Men. The actor Dougray Scott was slated to play the role, but was stuck on the delayed set of Mission: Impossible 2. At the last minute, Jackman got the call to fill in as a mutant named Wolverine. The role not only turned him from a struggling actor into someone to watch, it also transformed him -- body, mind, and soul. To get in condition for the role, he embarked upon a weight-lifting and exercise program beyond mental conception. Later, he worked diligently at yoga for nine months to achieve the perfect position, then another three to hold it indefinitely, never accepting limits or being inhibited by fear. (“How does someone run a 100-meter race at the Olympics?” Hugh told Men’s Health of how people rise under pressure. “When it’s once every four years … It can’t just be adrenaline … Maybe, it’s just the mind getting out of the way.”)
He reprised the Wolverine role in the X-Men 2 sequel in 2003. Then, in 2004, another unlikely career turn: the role of actor-singer-dancer Peter Allen in the Broadway production of The Boy From Oz. “I’d done probably three musicals,” he said. “But no one was tapping me on the shoulder saying, ‘You should do musical theater one day.’ I thought my agent was on drugs.” The role of Peter Allen, more than two hours of high-energy singing and dancing six nights and two matinees, was demanding. “That’s definitely the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life,” he said. “I lived the life of a monk. I never went out after the show, ever. You have to get a lot of sleep when you are singing. There were 20 songs a show, eight times a week. I quit coffee for the year because someone told me coffee can dehydrate you and that will limit your range. I had to eat dairy-free. I was on some diet. I would just go on complete vocal rest and would carry around a notepad and just sort of talked that way. I did that after reading Celine Dion did it. I thought, ‘Good enough for Celine Dion, I’ll give that a shot.’ Anything to get through. I mean, my main fear was, ‘How will I get through this?’ I had great support and my wife was very, very patient as were my kids.” He not only got through it; he won a Tony Award for best actor in a musical. Jackman also hosted the Tony Awards for several years.
He and Deborra-Lee Furness were married in 1996. They have two adopted children. “We met on a TV series, my first job out of drama school,” he said. “I was terrified. Deb was a very, very big name, she is still a big name, particularly here in Australia. She has done some 25 films here. The TV series was called Corelli, and she played Louisa Corelli, who was a prison psychologist, and I played Kevin Jones, who was an inmate in for armed robbery, and the two of them kind of see each other, these characters, locked between the bars. By episode nine, we started kissing -- this is on screen, by the way … Coming out of it was me and Deb -- we pretty much hit it off straight away.”
They’ve recently formed their own production company with friend John Palermo, called Seed Productions. “One of the first things she said when we got married was, ‘We won’t be apart more than two weeks,’” he continued. “And I was all for it. She had a look of someone who had seen quite a few marriages go astray, I think. And of course, now, I realize that it’s not always easy. It’s not particularly easy on the kids, but up till now, it’s the lesser of evils, I think. At least we are all together. We never spend longer than two weeks apart.”
THE BACKDROP OF WHAT JACKMAN called “the epic romantic adventure” of Australia is known as the Adelaide River Stakes, the 1942 Japanese bombing of the Australian town of Darwin and the exodus of a multitude of Australians.
For five months, they “work-shopped” the film in Sydney, reading lines and talking motivation. “Nicole and I, of course, are buddies,” he said. “We have been friends for a long time. She and my wife flatted together in Hollywood when Nicole first came. So in a way it was so easy, but in another way, it was like, ‘Okay, how are we going to play this sensual sort of relationship, in the middle of this deep epic romance?’ We talked quite seriously about all the details, exactly how we’d handle that. What I love about Nicole is she’s just, it’s like she is straight out of drama school. It’s like this is her first shot. It’s like this is her big break. She’s got this enthusiasm and determination to not waste any opportunity any day, any shot, any close-up -- it doesn’t matter whose side it is. My side or her side. She’s fantastic like that.”
Nothing could prepare them for the heat of the Australian Outback. They shot some of the film in a place called Kangaroo Valley, where the heat was so intense that both Kidman and Jackman almost fainted beneath the intense sun, heavy period costumes, and long days on horseback. “It was like being on Mars,” he said. “Some places we had to get to by helicopter. But we were living out there in our trailers. One of the first days of shooting, it must have been up near 120 or something. That’s what it measured in the shade. Nicole’s character was an English aristocrat who’s come out here [to Australia]. So her story is how she’s completely, inappropriately dressed for almost every situation in the Outback, particularly in the beginning. She had a three-piece woolen suit on, and sitting on top of a horse, it was very hot. But Nicole, she’s a fighter. The last thing she wants to do is to show the crew that she’s not tough. She’s a tough girl, that one. I almost passed out on one of those first days.”
He didn’t, of course. Because he was on a horse, and, he knew, you don’t fall off a horse, no matter what. Jackman trained for his role as a cattle drover on a horse with real cowboys in Texas. “In learning how to ride, I had already coughed up so many bottles of whiskey to the riding crew because there’s a little rule if you fall off a horse, then you have to [buy] everyone’s whiskey, and trust me I’ve bought my fair share of whiskey.”
He’s being modest, Baz Luhrmann told me. “Hugh actually lived in this part of the country, so he had a natural connection to the land. He is also genuinely physically confident. When he began, he wasn’t much of a horse rider, but when he finished he was legendary. On top of his obvious acting abilities, he also possesses that natural, wry, self-effacing kind of Aussie humor that is endemic to that kind of hero. Indeed, from the day Hugh became the Drover, this film burst into life, and a lot of that had to do with the simple fact that he was quite literally perfect for the role.”
It didn’t sound like this was just a role; it was a test of national pride. I asked Nicole Kidman, whom the Aussie press proudly calls “Our Nicole,” if Jackman’s strength of character is typically Australian. “It’s hard to explain if you don’t know Australian men,” she said. “I think it’s laconic but tough, daring, but at the same time, respectful. Hugh is all those things as Drover. Hugh and I were very proud to make this film. We grew up in the Australian film industry and were privileged to work with some incredible directors and actors. Hugh and I often talked about how wonderful it was that we were able to come back to Australia and make a film for all Australians about Australia.”
So there they were in the Outback, with hundreds of horses, amid the intense heat, the infinite kangaroos and poisonous snakes, filming what is essentially a love story in one of the most remote corners of the earth. According to press materials for the film, “The title Australia is intended to sum up the story of Lady Sarah Ashley’s life -- her journey, the landscape, and the people she meets -- all of which transform her life forever.”
The instrument of that change is, of course, the Drover, embodied by Hugh Jackman but instilled with the ghosts of Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and all the stoic leading men who rescue women, cheat the odds, and save the day. “We filmed a beautiful Christmas scene at dusk on our first night of shooting up in the Outback of Kununurra,” Nicole Kidman said. “We were under a Boab tree with a beautiful sunset in the background. We were laughing, and we all just looked around and stopped laughing. The beauty of the location and the light was so spiritual and awe-inspiring and we all said to each other how we would always remember this moment. We have all put our hearts into this film, so I hope that comes through in the end.”
As for goals, well, Jackman said it’s best to forget them. “If I said back 15 years ago in drama school, ‘I really want to be doing a movie called Australia with Nicole Kidman and one of the top directors of the world,’ I probably wouldn’t have had the guts to say it because the chances were one in a million,” he said. “I do love the thrill of rolling with the punches.”
And what a roll he’s on now.
’TIS THE SEASON
IN THIS TIME OF GIVING, HUGH JACKMAN SHARES THESE COMMENTS:
THE BEST GIFT HE EVER GAVE
“My mom tells me that I gave her the best present ever when I had absolutely no money. I was an acting student and a bum. Mom, she had to pay for the groceries. For Christmas, I gave my mom 20 home-cooked dinners. I cooked them.”
THE BEST PRESENT HE EVER RECEIVED
“My wedding ring, which is probably the most valuable thing to me. A present I just received is Amazon Kindle [a wireless reading device that holds more than 200 titles including books, newspapers, and blogs]. I am obsessed with that thing. It changed my life. I’m literally the hardest person to buy for. But that Amazon Kindle is with me on every flight I ever take. I carry 20 books with me on trips and I’ve just got that one thing. Brilliant. Do you have one? I just read this book called The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs on it.”