Hugh Jackman

by Anthony Bunko

  At the age of eleven, Jackman finally left all the girls behind and moved to Knox Grammar School. The school was established on Sydney’s north shore in 1924 by the Presbyterian Church and was named after John Knox. Knox was a 16th-century Scottish reformer who planned a network of similar schools in every church parish. It was a very religious, upper-crust boys’ establishment, which became a production line for students who often progressed into high-flying professional careers.

  Hugh recalls Knox Grammar School with fondness. ‘I am a person who loves to learn new things and challenge myself. I totally credit this quality to the education I received at Knox. One’s effort was always held higher than one’s results, and a true passion for learning and discovery was at the heart of everything we did.’

  Due to his gangly appearance and his skinny ‘chicken legs’, he picked up the nickname ‘Sticks’, which stayed with him right through his schooling. The fact that he spent most of his time at Knox wearing a kilt and enjoying a truly Scottish education didn’t help.

  Yet, Hugh has no regrets about his Celtic connections – or the Scottish skirts. He actually gained a secret passion for the Scottish national dress. ‘Despite the blistering heat, my school had the whole Scottish thing going on; it was Presbyterian. We had the thistle in our emblem, as well as a pipe band, and I used to have to wear a kilt to school.’ Although wearing a kilt might seem bizarre in Australia, it was very normal for Hugh. ‘When I was in the cadets, I had to wear the whole outfit, complete with a sporran, every Friday. Everybody made fun of us because the local school kids thought we were this strange oddity. But because my brothers also went to my school and I grew up seeing them in the kilt, it was normal to me.’

  Hugh quickly developed into an all-round sportsman who excelled in everything he did. He was a skilled rugby player (when he wasn’t using it to offload his anger); he also loved cricket, played basketball, took part in high jump, and swam freestyle and butterfly.

  During his senior year, in 1986, he was elected school captain. The tradition of a school captain was founded in British Empire-legacy school systems in countries like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and others.

  Hugh’s name was put forward by members of staff and he was elected by a voting system that involved the student body. To become the school captain was a real honour and the students who filled the position were usually individuals who had achieved a higher degree of commitment, dedication, experience and knowledge above that of the average student. In the role, Hugh acted as liaison between the students at large and the faculty staff, and between the school and the community. He loved the honour and the attention it brought: ‘I wasn’t particularly a goody-two-shoes, but I was always somehow the guy that would get up onstage to make the speech. I don’t know; I remember thinking, “Oh, I’ve been chosen to do this.” So there you go.’

  Hugh starred as the lead role in the school production of My Fair Lady in 1985. The musical was directed by the headmaster, Dr Ian Paterson, who was impressed by Hugh’s confidence and attitude. Brian Buggy, Knox Grammar’s music teacher, remembered him as a lovely pupil at school, intelligent with a real passion for theatre.

  It was when he first started to dabble with going on stage at school that one story emerged which has gone down in Jackman family folklore. After his performance at the school variety show when Hugh was twelve, a teacher suggested that he should consider taking dance lessons because he showed lots of promise. He came home and told his dad, who was quite supportive of the idea. But his brother overheard the conversation and yelled out, ‘Ah, you bloody poof!’ Hugh said he wasn’t quite sure what a ‘poof’ was but he knew it didn’t sound like something he should be. He never took the lessons. Later in life he recalled how his brother apologised when they went to see a show together and he realised that he had stopped the younger Jackman from ‘cleaning up with all the girls.’ Hugh was more disappointed he had bowed to peer pressure and missed out on those vital years of learning to dance properly. To add insult to injury, his brother, at the age of thirty, gave up being a sports journalist to do musical theatre!

  It was during his yearly trips to see his mother and while going to see numerous shows in London with her that Hugh’s real love of the theatre blossomed. On the long return trip back to Oz he would daydream about one day treading the boards in the West End.

  Despite his love of theatre and his well-behaved manner, Hugh still had a streak of macho bravado running through his veins. He continued to play crazy and sometimes dangerous games. Often he would get involved in head-butting competitions with his mates to see who could make the biggest dent in the metal lockers at school. One of the most foolish and treacherous regular pastimes was roof-riding. Hugh and his gang of friends would take turns in lying on top of a car, holding on through the windows, while the vehicle raced through the streets or around waste land. Sometimes it reached speeds of well over 100 miles per hour. ‘We stopped after an insane driver lost control of the car and it skidded, sending the unfortunate roof-top passenger flying through the air, breaking his leg in several places.’

  However, the young Jackman still worked hard at school and his grades were good – but he had given up on the idea of following in his father’s footsteps. Instead he decided to attend the city’s University of Technology, taking a BA honours degree in communications with the aim of becoming a journalist. By coincidence, this was the same route taken by another famous Hollywood actor who later in life became his friend (and rival): George Clooney.

  During his gap year between leaving Knox Grammar and starting at university, Hugh decided to use his time to do a spot of travelling. Like most Australians do at some time in their lives, he bought a cheap airline ticket to get away from the island continent for a while. ‘It’s your rite of passage. Every Australian travels. We’re the great wanderers,’ he once said.

  He ended up touring and working in Britain when he was eighteen. It was a rewarding experience for him, although on one occasion while drinking in a bar in the beautiful city of Bath, England, he ended up learning about life the hard way. ‘I met up with a few Aussies, and got so drunk I ended up singing some Australian songs very obnoxiously. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and clocked me across the face, laying me out. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. All I remember is getting up and smelling blood.’ He laughed and added, ‘Today that would be on someone’s cell phone, right?’

  Hugh quickly recovered from the fracas and like most teenagers at that age put the fight down to experience and moved on. Shortly afterwards, he ended up working at the prestigious Uppingham School in the East Midlands. Founded in 1584, it had celebrated its 400th anniversary the previous year. Hugh became an assistant housemaster, helping the teachers with English and drama lessons. His laid-back approach went down a storm with both students and teachers alike, and he left quite an impression on those who worked with him. In a somewhat old-fashioned environment, he was a breath of Australian fresh air. He had a natural gift for putting people at ease and a great sense of humour. On more than one occasion he found himself being drafted in to instruct a class of fourteen-year-olds. He found the whole experience brilliant if not a little ironic: ‘Here I was, an eighteen-year-old Aussie teaching English to a bunch of English kids. I thought, if that was my school fees, I’d be pretty annoyed.’

  But he loved the olde English quaintness of Uppingham School; all the pomp and ceremony, the rules and tradition, even little things like the small doorways and tiny stairways. He had a ball there and really wanted to stay, but Australia was calling him home.

  Richard Boston, retired housemaster of Uppingham and secretary of the Old Boys’ Association said, ‘Hugh arrived from Sydney at the age of eighteen. He was a great guy and still is. I remember him coming in as a fresh-faced, young gap student during the winter term. He was a delightful, open sort of person, exactly the same as he is now. A great communicator, and he would have made a brilliant schoolmaster had he continued in that di
rection rather than with acting. No one at the school was surprised when Hugh reached the height of his fame and best of all, it looks like it hasn’t changed him one iota.’

  A much more confident and wiser young man returned to his homeland and ploughed into his communication studies. He enjoyed the course and was a very optimistic student, picturing himself working as a freelance correspondent for ABC or the BBC somewhere in the Middle East, learning the art of journalism, filing reports, changing the world. ‘I found it something a little different to what I had done before. Journalism combined something very close to intellectual rigour with a close involvement with people.’

  Vice-chancellor Professor Ross Milbourne at the University of Technology said, ‘The University was proud to have contributed to shaping an individual of such inestimable qualities.’

  To pay his way through university, Hugh took a series of low-paid jobs. He moonlighted from midnight to dawn pumping gas at a Shell garage, chatting to visiting insomniacs. But that job came to an abrupt end when someone on another shift was held up at gunpoint by a robber with a shotgun. He fast came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth getting killed for a few bucks.

  At one point he and his friend Stan were clowns performing at kids’ parties; Hugh was Coco and Stan played Bozo. They had no tricks, talent or passion for it, although Jackman later learned to juggle. Instead, they would simply jump into dustbins and throw eggs at each other, and were eventually fired after too many children complained. ‘At one party, the little birthday girl stood up and shouted out that I was the worse clown she had ever seen,’ Hugh revealed. But he wasn’t really sorry to get the boot – he reckoned it was the hardest 50 bucks he had ever earned.

  He also worked for the National Parks and Wildlife Foundation, handing out leaflets, half the time dressed as a ranger, the other half as Kooey the Koala. Clad in a huge furry suit, he would often pass out from the heat and once, when expected to run the city’s annual City to Surf marathon dressed as Kooey, he slipped down a side street and drove to within sight of the finishing line. He came in 600th out of 40,000 runners and still remains the highest-placed marsupial in the marathon’s history. ‘Dressing up in a koala suit was a real low point in my career. I certainly didn’t do that for the art,’ he later admitted.

  During one of his summer breaks, he participated in a Christian working camp in the Areyonga Aboriginal community on Haasts Bluff in the Western Desert of Central Australia. Something happened to him there in the outback which changed his whole outlook on life. By then, he was nineteen 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. Hugh told him to take off and said he’d manage the store for a month by himself. ‘The locals loved it because I’m sure they were nicking so much stuff, and I had no idea,’ he joked later. Yet he discovered a strange, unexpected serenity out in that faraway place. Suddenly all the things that frequently 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 felt so right. The Aborigines inspired me. I was inspired by the family, the community, their culture, their togetherness. I’d only seen images of problems in their culture, either drinking or poverty or health issues that’s all I knew about the aborigine people.’

  He considered staying in Areyonga for good, but his father urged him to go back to college. ‘But it was just to finish the course off so I’d get the piece of paper,’ Hugh recalled. ‘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.’

  When he returned for a new term, he enrolled in drama class, mainly to ensure that he had enough credits to pass the course itself. ‘When doing my communication degree, I had to do 24 units. I needed an extra two units to be safe so I enrolled reluctantly into drama class because I heard it was quite easy to pass.’ That term they were putting on a production of Vaclav Havel’s play The Memorandum, an absurdist piece, and thanks to a bizarre casting technique Hugh ended up in the lead role, even though he didn’t want it.

  ‘My teacher was sort of left-wing. I decided to do this class because everyone said you don’t have to do anything; you just turn up. So I turned up, and for the first time in 10 years the teacher decided to do a play, and everyone had to be in it. He cast it in a very egalitarian way: the class list was in alphabetical order and he just drew a line and you played whoever your name was against on the list. I got the lead. And I was like, “I don’t have time for this – I’m doing my journal.”’

  In fact, he found the part daunting and told the teacher that he couldn’t manage it, but would be more than happy to get involved backstage or to help out in other ways. But the teacher wouldn’t have any of it and said he either had to play the part or leave the class, which meant he wouldn’t graduate. Hugh was forced into a corner and had no choice but to attempt the role. He surprised himself by really enjoying it. The show ended up touring around the area and, slowly but surely, he started to fall in love with the stage and acting. It was then that doubts began to creep into his head about what he wanted to do. He realised quite quickly that his real interest wasn’t in asking questions or getting stories; it was in playing characters and being part of the narrative itself.

  ‘I soon began to appreciate I didn’t have the passion or the skill or the personality to become a journalist. At the start of the course I had big dreams of becoming a great writer, but quickly realised that life wasn’t that simple and I would probably be assigned to crappy articles that no one wanted to read. And that you had to do exactly what your editor told you or get fired.’

  The final nail in the journalism coffin came during the last few weeks of the course, when Hugh’s teacher, Wendy Bacon, talked in detail about some of the less ethical parts of the job. At that time, a very naive Hugh believed investigative journalism was all about touring the world, capturing great stories and nailing deadlines, and so he was shocked when Wendy told the class that the reality of the situation was that in their first few years, they would probably be doing what is called in the trade ‘death-knocks’. Hugh would be expected to knock on the doors of bereaved parents or relatives to try and get an interview, or even worse to steal photographs of the deceased from the mantelpiece so they could be printed in the paper. It didn’t sound the least bit appealing. In fact, it switched Hugh off so much that he decided that once he got his degree he would turn to his real passion, acting.

  He tried out with a local theatre group as a hobby, appearing in an amateur production. However, he knew at the age of twenty-one that if he was serious about becoming an actor it was now or never. He needed to enrol in acting school. The best one around was a year-long programme called The Journey at the Actors Centre in Sydney. The Journey is ACA’s (Actors Centre Australia) most prestigious programme, with applicants auditioning from across Australia and New Zealand. Actors Centre prides itself on a culture of artistic nourishment and freedom of expression. It sounded perfect to Hugh. He applied and the audition went well, but he had one serious problem: the course cost $3,500 Australian dollars – money he didn’t have.

  It was then that the hand of fate played a pivotal role in his life. ‘I got a letter one day telling me I was accepted on to the programme, but sadly it also informed me how much it would cost,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t have the money and I thought that was that. I couldn’t ask anyone for the cash and I couldn’t get credit from the banks; I was stuck. Then the following day, I got a cheque in the mail from my grandmother’s will for $3,500. I thought, “Whoa, that’s it! The signs don’t get much better than that.”’

  He subsequently enrolled and found the course to be alternately exhilarating and terrifying. At first he felt as though the world was against him and that the very ‘Beckett and Chekhov’ – dark and brooding – instructors disliked him for his cl
ean-cut image and his upbeat, friendly personality. He has admitted that the first three months were probably one of the most humiliating and lonely times of his life: ‘I was this guy who was not only a bad actor – I also showed none of those signs that budding actors should show. I didn’t have a beaten-up leather jacket. I wasn’t smoking 60 cigarettes a day, I didn’t seem to have all these neuroses, you know, and I just figured, “Damn, I’ve gotta find some demons in here or I’m gonna get kicked out of the school!” All the other cool guys had all these major dramas and they had this Brando/Jimmy Dean kind of thing going; and I was just like all cheerful and nice.’

  He felt completely exposed; it was the first time in his life that teachers were challenging him, asking him to step up to the mark, telling him straightaway if they thought what he was doing was no good. At times he felt he regarded himself as the class dunce, something that was alien to the former model pupil of Knox Grammar. Feeling vulnerable and overwhelmed, it was as if the whole experience shook him out of what he saw as a gifted child’s complacency.

  He still remembers the early advice he received from a girl in his class, who approached him one day: ‘You’re too nice, you’ll never make it. If you want to be in this business, you’ve got to get tougher.’

  The reality of the situation whacked him across the face like a baseball bat. He had to change or sink, and so he knuckled down, stepped out of the comfort zone of his middle-class upbringing and started to search for demons inside that he could use to his advantage.

  Eventually, the whole acting thing started to fall into place, and it soon became apparent to those around him that there was something special about Hugh Jackman. He had a knack of lighting up a room and making people take notice whenever he performed.