Playboy's 20Q: Hugh Jackman

How often do you see a preppie morph into an international film star? "I went to an upper-crust boys' school where most students became professionals--doctors or lawyers," says Australian Hugh Jackman. "A career in the arts or in sports may seem terribly glamorous, but for most people it's not going to happen."

It's happening for Jackman.

After graduation, he traded his school uniform, straw boater and navy blazer ("We have these odd throwbacks to the English tradition") for a backpack and cheap airline tickets to get away from the island continent. "It's your rite of passage. Every Australian travels. We're the great wanderers."

Following journalism studies and "traveling around the world and doing everything and really not finding my home anywhere," Jackman clicked as a serious drama student. Since 1991 he has appeared in Shakespeare plays, independent films, musical comedies and on an Australian television series. (His wife, Deborra-lee Furness, played his psychologist in one show.) He has made his way--expenses now paid--to London for stage work and to North America, where he donned the sideburns and claws of the mutant Wolverine, one of the heroes of X-Men, in the first film based on the legendary comic book series. Since then, he has appeared on-screen in a thriller (Swordfish, with John Travolta) and in romantic comedies--he's currently starring opposite Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold.

But Jackman has his critics. One of his countrymen, a veteran tabloid reporter, recently pronounced him "too good-looking."

Contributing Editor Warren Kalbacker met the actor after a long night of filming in New York City. "Jackman arrived rested and ready for the interview," Kalbacker recalls. "And he was in good voice--very good voice--as I was to discover halfway through our session."

1

[Q] Playboy: Your rise to stardom since leaving Australia has been rapid. Did you do it on your own or does the Canberra government maintain a program to export actors and increase the country's foreign exchange earnings?

[A] Jackman: The wool industry is diminishing, so the government has to look at acting. They farm us out when we're four and put us into little compounds and stuff us full of Stanislavsky and Method. After traveling around the world, I got a big taste for acting during a part-time course. I was working as a waiter and this woman locked eyes with me and said, "I'm a white witch." I said, "Oh, terrific." And she said, "Things are going to be big for you. You're going to go with the ride and it's going to happen fast." "OK," I said, Government agent. This is part of the plot. This is a good conspiracy. Go along with it. The next day she introduced me to the person who is now my agent, and I was offered a part in Australia's most popular soap. "Holy shit," I said. "They're going to pay me to do this?" Then, while I was waiting for the contract to come through, I realized how honorable acting is if you do it at a high ideal, the craft it requires, and the tradition. So I went in and said I didn't want to do the soap opera. Then I studied acting for three years. The day I graduated, I walked straight into a part on a great prison series for the Australian Broadcasting Corp.--a very worthy government-run TV station. I was really glad, because I would never have casted that. The role I was going to play in the soap opera was just me--young, charming. In the series I was playing Kevin Jones, armed robber, manipulative, strong, silent--a Wolverine character.

2

[Q] Playboy: You've bared your chest in several movies. As a former attendant at a health club, tell us what gym personnel really think of the pectorally challenged.

[A] Jackman: Pectorally challenged? That was me when I worked at the gym. I was known as the "before model." All the others were these buff gym guys. I never understood the gym culture. Why would you do it? Sitting there pushing weights seemed ridiculous to me. Go to the beach and swim or go out and run. Then I played the prisoner, and when I visited the jail, I thought, Shit, I have to get to the gym because these guys are big. They spend a lot of time working out to survive in there. Later, I played the stage role of Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, and as part of my contract, I had to stay at a certain weight and train with a trainer and do all this physical stuff. I was in the gym a year and a half. My body completely changed, and part of me liked it. My wife, Deb, doesn't care. She says the male Hollywood body is not sexy. I don't think a lot of women find it sexy. She says strong is sexy if someone is naturally strong, like a laborer. But not the waxed and sculpted body. We just need to do a little laboring on the side.

3

[Q] Playboy: We'll buff up by hefting a pick and shovel. Care to pass along any other shape-up tips?

[A] Jackman: It's sexy if a guy can dance--if you go to a wedding and can just pick up a woman and dance with her and make her look good on the dance floor. I've always loved dancing. I think it's the best exercise. I love tap. I love jazz. My wife and I do a lot of salsa dancing. We went to Cuba for the millennium, and we had a private instructor who taught us for a couple of hours a day. You go to Cuba, and these guys in cheap suits get up on that dance floor and they're the sexiest, suavest, coolest guys there. They don't need the $100,000 cars or the Gucci and Prada. I've done dancing quite a lot in my life, and it's a shame it's not more a part of our culture.

4

[Q] Playboy: Were you wary of starring with Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold, given her well-known passion for Australian men?

[A] Jackman: An Australian man. There was this romantic scene on a rooftop. We were up maybe 12 floors, and my character was seducing her. It was one of those nights--the moon was out and it was warm. Everyone was so happy, all the crew just sitting there looking downtown. It was magical. Two minutes with Meg and you realize she's a special lady. She's extraordinarily generous and warmhearted, down-to-earth. The first day we got to rehearsal I was eating sushi. She asked me where I got it. I said my driver had gone to get it. She said, "You just had your driver go get your sushi?" I said, "Well, yeah. Hello? Meg, you're a major motion picture star. You can ask your driver--who is waiting outside 24 hours a day--to get it." And she said, "I always forget things like that. I'm not a very good star. I've got to get better at that."

5

[Q] Playboy: In the event his date insists on taking in a romantic comedy like Kate and Leopold, can you offer a strategy for how a gentleman might make the best of it?

[A] Jackman: If you're to learn anything from Leopold, it's "Do everything with grace." I certainly wouldn't think it would be the worst night of a man's life. I saw Kate and Leopold and really liked it. No point sitting through the film and shrugging your shoulders. Put your arm around your lady. Unfortunately, I could become the most hated guy in films if the characters I play are so romantic that a girl says to her date, "Why don't you do things like that for me?" So before you go to the movie, do something that's unexpected. Then, when you watch the movie, she'll turn to you and say, "You're just like this guy."

6

[Q] Playboy: As the son of an accountant, did you inherit your father's ability to keep the books?

[A] Jackman: Yeah. I have inherited a little of his accounting skill, but not the discipline my father has. I'm the fifth child, so the skills got watered down by that point. The oldest, who vowed never to do it, married an accountant and is an accountant herself. My father was a senior partner at what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. When I started making a lot of money--more money than I thought I'd ever make in my life--I went straight to Dad. He's been really helpful with advice on what to do with my money. My father had a strict upbringing, born during the Depression in England, delayed gratification, all those true British grit qualities. But he's actually emotional, very effusive. I did a production of Romeo and Juliet as my final piece for drama school. I played Romeo, and I looked out and saw my father weeping. And I started to weep. It was one of those great moments.

7

[Q] Playboy: Do Australians think Americans and the British speak the mother tongue with weird accents?

[A] Jackman: Americans aren't weird to us. The majority of the world speaks the way you guys do. The reality is that most of our films and television are American. I was brought up in Sydney, where a lot of the accent is American. We use Americanisms. The accent is not really the kind of Australian accent you hear out in the bush--the Paul Hogan--Crocodile Dundee thing. I have a friend; everything he says is an expression. He has one for every situation. Finishes a meal and says, "I feel full as a doctor's wallet." I laugh every time.

8

[Q] Playboy: You acted with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in X-Men. How do these English actors maintain their dignity and gravitas--not to mention straight faces--while wearing funny headgear lifted from a comic book?

[A] Jackman: Both of them love acting and are also surprisingly silly and childlike. We have this design of them as doyens of the theater, but they're really playful, outgoing, irreverent. I've never worked with Judi Dench, but she's a notorious giggler. She cracks up all the time onstage. So when you do movies like X-Men, it's just fun. Stewart and McKellen are the English version of De Niro and Pacino. The scenes those two had together really excited me. The English technique--ultimately the same technique as the American--is about having the internal works going 100 percent. The whole English lifestyle is about reading between the lines. It's all about what you haven't said. They have a beautiful way of playing that. There's so much going on underneath the surface and in the pauses and when they're listening and it's very still. The English tradition, particularly in the last generation, which you see in Ben Kingsley, Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, is the ability to be irreverent and playful and emotionally full and open and yet intellectually rigorous. I think their intellectual rigor is extraordinary, the way they attack the text.

9

[Q] Playboy: At the end of Someone Like You, you shared a freeze-frame kiss with Ashley Judd. Comment on this cliché, which we see in every romantic comedy.

[A] Jackman: It's Hollywood, what can you say? They don't finish with the argument or when, three weeks later, they're giving each other the shits and saying, "This is not going to work out." That damn song is never playing in the background, either. When you're kissing, you're thinking the baby's going to wake up, or isn't that when the phone rings? The reality of making films with the kiss moment is probably as fraught with trauma as it is in real life. You have people telling you, "Just open your mouth a little more, but don't use your tongue. We don't want the tongue, because close up it really looks ugly on film--but we really want it to look passionate. Come in for a slow kiss." I had this two-day stubble and Ashley was starting to look like Ronald McDonald, because I was ripping her to shreds when I was kissing her.

10

[Q] Playboy: You were nominated for an Olivier Award for your performance as Curly in the London production of Oklahoma. Can you account for the universal appeal of the American musical? But first, complete this lyric: Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry--

[A] Jackman: [Sings] When I take you out in my surrey, when I take you out in the surrey with the fringe on top. I can go on. [Hums a bit, then sings] The wheels are yellow, the upholstery's brown, the dashboard's genuine leather, with isinglass curtains you can roll right down, in case there's a change in the weather. It is one of the best songs ever written in musical theater. This lover's bubbling. He's being cheeky. The words are kind of onomatopoeic. Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for actors. If you're in the right frame of mind, and you're actually acting the song, the singing of it is easy. It's exciting. American musical theater is that perfect blend of incredible technique and intelligence and craft to the point where you can get carried into another world that is totally unbelievable--the fantasy of going along with characters. A great American musical gets you involved. You laugh. You love it. And you love to get carried away. Some people who'd seen the original production of Oklahoma were scared to see our production, because they didn't want to tarnish the memory they had. The Queen Mum came backstage and said she'd seen it many times. She told me, "Philip used to sing People Will Say We're in Love to Elizabeth, but I have to say, you seem a lot better than he was."

11

[Q] Playboy: Before accepting the role of clawed Wolverine in X-Men, did you consult with Johnny Depp of Edward Scissorhands about how to achieve a characterization with an unusual manicure?

[A] Jackman: I should have. The hands are the hardest thing. I'm a big fan of Johnny Depp. I might get a few tips for the sequel. I know I have to prepare for it and I'll be ready. I was thrown into the X-Men job a week into filming. I'd never heard of the X-Men, and we kind of created the character on the spot. The first pair of claws I got were the real thing. You'd touch them and prick your finger. I said, "These looked great, but I can't fight with them." I punctured myself. I hit myself with them and cut my head open. I was fighting with one of the stunt-people and something happened and one went straight into her. The claws were dangerous. They were nine inches long. But we had some fun with them, too. Between takes I stuck marsh allows on them. The crew made me new claws--instead of blades, one was a pair of scissors and one was a magnifying glass.

12

[Q] Playboy: Will your X-Men action figure increase in value as a collectible, provided it remains in its original, sealed box?

[A] Jackman: Probably more valuable if I haven't signed it. When we were all on the set, they came out with the prototype clay heads and we all had to look at ours and say yes or no. McKellen looked at his and said he looked very young, that he loved the eyes and it didn't look a thing like him. He said, "I love it, you can do it." I didn't want mine to look completely like me. I don't know why. People might start sticking forks into it or sticking it into the freezer. There's one figure that talks with my voice. My son's now getting into it. But I promise he won't have Wolverine pillowcases and wallpaper and towels.

13

[Q] Playboy: In Swordfish you play a computer hacker. Was it all fake or are you really comfortable with your laptop?

[A] Jackman: I'm pretty good. They even have the little ones now, the Motorola Timeport thing. I e-mail on that all the time, because most of my family lives in Australia or England. I surf the Net a little. As far as cracking codes, I'm really not into that. I've got brains.

14

[Q] Playboy: Swordfish features a topless Halle Berry and lots of tech hardware. Could we begin booting up our laptops with a whole new attitude?

[A] Jackman: There are indeed some sexy moments. Our director explained that the movie was about hackers, and that we had to make it sexy. The question: Are computers sexy? Traditionally, the answer is no. But Halle is sexy. Set Halle in front of a computer and all of a sudden computers are much more sexy.

15

[Q] Playboy: An actress recently complained to The New York Times that journalists asked her only about where she buys her lipstick and her stockings, never about anything important, such as ecology or politics. Don't you agree that an actress could be a more important source of information on cosmetics and hosiery than, say, global warming?

[A] Jackman: It's a dangerous position to think, as an actor, that your opinion matters. You're out there dressing up, pretending to be someone for others' entertainment. You're an entertainer. Actors were the fools in the old days. Like the jester in Shakespeare, you could affect people. Now your whole life is there for people to talk about, and you get paid well for it. We all loved to talk about Tom and Nicole. People genuinely got into it. Actors aren't quite real people. They're to be talked about. So much about being an actor is just being alive and listening and entertaining and providing a service. I can understand the frustrations that actress might have, but I think she should have a sense of humor about it. Ultimately, great actors are conduits for great scripts and great stories. They're not the center of the world.

16

[Q] Playboy: We know one gentleman from down under who seems unable to address men and women as Mr. and Ms. He calls men "mate" and he calls women "love." What is it with Australian informality?

[A] Jackman: We forget people's names, so we've come up with a foolproof system. Australians are the inventors of "let's just sit in front of the telly on Sunday nights." We've made it a lifestyle. We won the America's Cup in 1983. Biggest moment ever. Our prime minister got on television at seven in the morning and he said, "Any employer who sacks an employee for taking the day off is a bum." That was it. That's our prime minister.

17

[Q] Playboy: Koala bears are cuddly. Myth or reality?

[A] Jackman: Myth. They can be vicious unless they're stoned. The reality is they're stoned all the time because they eat eucalyptus. There's a petting zoo in Sydney--you queue for like seven hours--where you can pet them. If you comb their fur the right way, it's fine. But if you don't, it's bristly. I really don't like them. They're wild animals.

18

[Q] Playboy: Can you explain the fact that Australian-rules football, like American football, has never really taken off beyond national boundaries?

[A] Jackman: They're both barbaric. They're variations of the same thing, which is getting a bunch of mates together who just want to let off steam. So ridiculous. Boxing is the true sport, that's why it's universal. Australian football is phenomenal. It plays 18 per team. The field is vast. It's the biggest field, I think, of any sport. It's the fitness, athleticism, the guts, the running--all without pads. The shorts are like Christopher Street shorts--it's like they're wearing nothing. And the skill and the strength needed for that game is probably the greatest of all sports. And soccer is an amazing sport. It teaches everything. A kid can play, and he's not going to end up breaking his arm.

19

[Q] Playboy: Your son is almost two years old. To those hesitating about fatherhood, explain the joys of the three A.M. feeding and the changing of the diapers.

[A] Jackman: I can understand being hesitant. But all I can liken it to is that period of falling in love, when everything is ecstatic and the girl calls you at four in the morning because she's awake and she just loves you. She wants to tell you you're the best guy she's ever met. A year later you think, Four o'clock in the fucking morning? What is she doing? It's been a year. At times I don't want to get up and I think, Deb? Can you do it? But the moment you're there, it's fantastic.

20

[Q] Playboy: Does Hugh Jackman share Wolverine's amazing powers of regeneration?

[A] Jackman: That's how I got the part, man. I hope we don't make X-Men 8. I'll be 60, trying to look 32. You have to look exactly as you did in the first movie. That's scary.