“I used to spend nights looking at atlases,” Jackman says. “I decided I wanted
to be a chef on a plane. Because I’d been on a plane and there was food on
board, I presumed there was a chef. I thought that would be the ideal job.”
When he realised the grim reality of airline cuisine, he switched his
ambitions to the ministry.
“My dad was religious,” he says. “He was converted by Billy Graham, and he
used to take me to things like that.” Jackman found something appealing
about those itinerant preachers: maybe their power to spellbind a crowd.
“For two or three years I thought I might want to be a minister,” he says.
An accountant, a minister: Jackman was a good son, toeing the family line,
headed straight for mild normality.
But then something happened to him in the outback. He was 19 and building
homes for Aborigines as part of a Lutheran mission in Areyonga. He met the
owner of a general store who lamented that he hadn’t had a vacation in half
a decade. Jackman told him to take off; he’d manage the store, have a go.
And he did, for a month. “The locals loved it because I’m sure they were
nicking so much stuff, and I had no idea,” he says. But Jackman discovered a
weird, unexpected serenity out in the faraway.
Suddenly all the things that matter to a young man, like ambition and
idealism, started to melt away. “All the things you thought mattered to you
just go. It’s the land, that feeling of being part of something natural. It
feels right.” By this time Jackman was in college, half-heartedly intending
to pursue a career in radio journalism. He considered staying in Areyonga
for good, but his father urged him back to college. “But it was just to
finish it off so I’d get the piece of paper,” he says. “Not that I had my
sights set on acting then, but there was enough quiet in my head, I suppose,
for me to get an inkling of who I was.”
After enrolling in a college drama class (“Everyone knew the teacher, and it
was easy”), the former aspiring minister discovered acting. It didn’t come
as a bolt of lightning, but rather as a challenge — the former class
president and rugby player felt “like the dunce of the class, vulnerable and
overwhelmed” — that, eventually, came to feel like destiny. “I decided to
give it a crack,” he says. He was working the front desk at a Sydney gym
when Annie Semler, the wife of the award-winning Australian cinematographer
Dean Semler, came in for a sales tour, during which she suddenly stopped and
levelled an intense stare at Jackman. “You’re going to be a big star,”
Semler announced. “Don’t worry, it’s all going to happen so fast. Listen to
me, I’m a white witch.”
“At the time I was thinking, ‘Please just give me your credit card,’ ” Jackman
says. But the white witch was right. Jackman landed an agent the next day.
Two weeks later he was offered a role in an Aussie soap opera. It was a plum
gig, with the allure of easy money and quick fame, but to Jackman it felt
too safe. He turned it down, choosing instead to hunker down for another
three years of acting school. “I’d learnt just enough to know how little I
knew,” he says.
The risk paid off. Aside from a few clunky efforts and one near-miss (the CBS
show Viva Laughlin that he co-produced tanked last year after two episodes
and he was passed over to play James Bond), Jackman’s career arc has shot
steadily upwards, even as his range has veered steadily outwards. “I have
gone to the theatre for 60-some years,” the famed screenwriter William
Goldman wrote about Jackman’s performance in the Broadway show The Boy from
Oz. “I was there for Brando in ’47 in Streetcar. But nothing prepared me for
Hugh Jackman.”
Now he’s headlining the biggest production ever to come out of his native
country, shouldering his homeland’s history and character in all its
celluloid glory. Quite a go. But there’s one way Jackman’s not your typical
Aussie. “I don’t drink much,” he admits. Which is his way of saying he’s
still a bit hungover from a week-long guys’ trip to Japan that ended a few
days earlier.
We’re sitting at a cafe while Deb orders coffee for us all. He went on
the cruise with 11 childhood friends. “Very hard thing to organise, with 11
40-year-old guys with their lives and wives and families and jobs. It took
me a while to get my fitness on the drinking front. There were some very fit
boys on that front.”
Owing to Australia’s other leading men, Russell Crowe (who moved from New
Zealand as a child) and Mel Gibson, we’ve come to expect a certain bad-boy
mystique from Aussie actors: a penchant for fist-fights, busted-up
marriages, wild binges. Jackman is the antithesis to all that. If it’s
perhaps too facile to see, in his devotion to family, the glint of the
motherless boy who wanted only normality, it’s also impossible to ignore. He
at least adheres to that conventional notion: the doting father and husband,
the man for the job. “I think he’s from another planet,” says John Palermo,
Jackman’s longtime friend and production partner. “You can compare him,
professionally, to Kelly, Astaire and McQueen, but he doesn’t have the
temper or drama their lives had. He’s a happily married actor who spends
honest time with his children.” Ask Jackman about the biggest risk he has
ever taken, and the answer comes instantaneously: “Marriage, the whole
family life. It’s not so much a risk as a surrender: kind of like, okay, I’m
jumping into the rapids.”
He met Deb, an actress and director eight years his senior, on the set of
Correlli, an Australian TV series they both appeared in; they were married
in 1996 and, after she suffered two miscarriages, adopted their son, Oscar,
in 2000 and Ava in 2005. Talking about them is when Jackman seems most
enthusiastic; the films are nice and all, and the karaoke on Sting’s yacht,
but this is when he leans in hard, when his eyes focus. “What you learn
being married is better than any classroom or anything you can study, or any
job,” he says. “If I didn’t have Deb, I don’t know if I’d have kept acting.
With the risks, having someone’s unconditional love means you can fall on
your ass and be completely loved, even if the rest of the world chucks
tomatoes at you.
“And the same with kids,” he says. “Everything is exposed with kids. There’s
no artifice, because they see you for exactly what you are. You can’t
pretend. Actors can fool people about the kind of person they are. You can
wear whatever mask you want to put on. But it doesn’t work with kids, you
know? If your career is more important than them, you’re going to have hell.
You see things get out of whack, out of balance, because they just mirror it
back to you. To feel at the end of the day that you haven’t done everything
you could for your kids — none of it’s worth it.
“It’s going to sound like I’m coming back to my work now,” he says, “but when
the head of the studio saw Australia, he said, ‘Mate, when your grandkids
ask your kids what you did, this is the movie they’ll put in.’ But, see?
Everything is related to the kids now. Frightening how in love with them you
are. It’s hard to go away, hard to do things like this. You have those
little flashes of them jumping into a road and you stop breathing.”
But that, Jackman knows, is the risk you take. You have a go, mate. Then you
throw everything you’ve got into it, do whatever it takes to push through to
the end. Even if it means getting punched in the nuts every now and again.
©2008 Men’s Journal. First published in Men’s Journal Magazine.
Distributed by Tribune Media Services
