Gill Pringle
Australian-born Hugh Jackman didn’t have an easy ride into the entertainment industry. Raised by a single father, Jackman’s occasionally unhappy childhood was brightened by an interest in acting and performing…which eventually got him to where he is today.
Born in Sydney, the last of five children, Jackman was raised by his accountant father, and while he and his siblings have since reconciled with their mother – who left the family when he was just eight-years-old – the young Jackman expressed his early loss by becoming something of a trouble-maker at school. “I rarely started any fights,” he says quickly. “I wasn’t out looking for a fight, but I had a short fuse. I played rugby growing up, so I got to fight a lot. I can remember often getting that Wolverine feeling of just losing it on the rugby field. Then five minutes later, after trying to mow everybody down, you’re exhausted and you’re over it. It worked. That said, I was way more a lover than a fighter,” he laughs.
It wasn’t until he reached adulthood that Jackman was able to make any sense of why his mother would leave. “The fact that they couldn’t love each other was weird to me, growing up,” he has said. “As a kid, it’s difficult to fathom. But once you’ve had a relationship that’s gone bad, you slowly begin to understand it. One thing that I loved so much about my dad was that I never once heard him say a bad word about my mother, and the temptation to do so must have been enormous.”
Originally planning on following his father into a career in accountancy, Jackman was eventually drawn to performance. “I was always into acting in school,” he says. “We put on our own productions. I always loved it. We did Shakespeare, and many other things. But the musicals were a big deal. I went to an all-boys school, and the musical was produced with the local girls’ high school, so everyone wanted to be at the musical. Everybody! It was essential to be in a high school musical.”
After school, Jackman took off travelling for a year before attending University of Technology Sydney. “I was enrolled in economics law because I got the marks for it,” the actor explains. “I’d said, ‘Okay, dad is an accountant, and my brother is a lawyer…that sounds good!’ After six months, I went, ‘What am I thinking? I’m not interested in either,’” says Jackman, who switched his major to journalism before falling into a drama class. “I was in my very last year, and I had to make up two units of my 24 to pass, so I picked up acting, because it was well known that Tony, the teacher, never did any tests. You just had to turn up. Perfect! But for the first time in ten years, he decided to do a play: The Memorandum by Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader. You had to do whatever part you were given. I ended up being given the lead, and I desperately tried to get out of it. I told him, ‘This is my final. This is two units out of 24’ to which he said, ‘That’s the way the line fell. If you don’t want to do it, you can get out.’ If I’d followed him, I wouldn’t have graduated. Fate played its hand, because I spent more time on those two units than the other 22 combined. I really loved it. And I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. I love this, and the other 22 units feel difficult and a burden. I’m not enjoying it.’ That’s when I thought maybe I’d have a go at the acting. It was very private. I didn’t want to tell anyone.”
Unlike many celebrated actors who make a big deal of thanking their first drama teacher as they collect their awards, Jackman has never laid eyes on his acting teacher since. “I never saw Tony again,” he smiles. “He’d probably think that I was very gauche being in Hollywood making movies for the mainstream. He would be distancing himself from me. The highlight for him would have been me doing The Memorandum. From then, it was all crap…”
With a communications degree in journalism, Jackman surprised his entire family by pursuing drama at The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), and then being offered a starring role in the TV prison drama Correlli immediately after. From there, Jackman went on to more Australian television (Snowy River, Halifax fp) and film roles (Paperback Hero, Erskineville Kings), before he headed over to Hollywood and started the infamously arduous audition process. He may even have still been trudging around that circuit had another actor’s misfortune not so pristinely played into his hands. Jackman was a last-minute addition to the X-Men (2000) cast because director Bryan Singer’s first choice – Scotsman, Dougray Scott – was held back by his work on Mission: Impossible II. “When I got cast in the first X-Men film, I was walking down the hallway of my American agency, and everyone was coming out of their offices,” Hugh Jackman laughs. “Assistants and secretaries were high fiving me! Someone shouted out, ‘Jackman! You rock, man! Wolverine, yeah!’ I thought, ‘Is this what happens to every actor when they get their first gig? What’s the deal?’ Later on, I realised that they knew what it all meant, but I was blissfully unaware…”
It would, of course, be the role that broke Hugh Jackman in Hollywood. “The last thing that I thought I would do after graduating from drama school was be an action movie guy,” he says. “Honestly, I thought that would be the last thing that I’d do. I’ve always approached Wolverine as another character, and it might seem hard to believe, but it’s probably one of the hardest challenges that I’ve had as an actor. It’s the backbone of my career, and it’s given me a lot of opportunities.”
Logan is in cinemas March 2, 2017.
