‘I offered Hugh the role on the spot. Usually, you think about it or you make a call, or you call an agent. It’s the first time I’ve ever offered a role to an actor on the spot since I offered Kevin Spacey The Usual Suspects. Jackman was really extraordinary.’
Bryan Singer, director of X-Men
CHAPTER SIX
Someone Likes Hugh
Suddenly, Hugh Jackman found himself catapulted from near-obscurity, especially in the USA, to immediate worldwide superstardom following the success of X-Men. His popularity grew to unimaginable heights within the film industry and his agent company (CAA) were bombarded with more scripts and offers than they could handle. Wisely, he wanted to avoid being typecast in the Wolverine-type action hero role for the time being, but he was keen to flex his acting muscles. Due to the amount and range of offers available, he was now able to carefully select characters that were far removed from the brooding, anti-authority Logan. It proved to be a busy and fruitful time for the man from Oz.
Not averse to doing a spot of comedy – he had done a little on stage and on TV, back in Australia – Hugh took the role of an incorrigible womaniser in the 2001 bitter-sweet, romantic comedy Someone Like You alongside Greg Kinnear and Ashley Judd. The screenplay had been adapted from the novel Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman, which was actually titled Animal Attraction on its release in the UK.
The story tells of how, after a series of ill-fated relationships, Jane (Ashley) finally meets Mr Right, Ray (Kinnear) who is emotionally available and not afraid of commitment. Six weeks into their blissful courtship, Ray asks Jane to move in with him and they start looking at apartments. But little by little, Ray starts to pull away and Jane realises that once again she’s been dumped. Her womanising co-worker, Eddie (Hugh), just happens to be looking for a roommate and so Jane reluctantly moves in.
Desperate to understand what happened and to get over Ray, she comes up with a theory of interpreting male-female relations by observing the behaviours of wild animals. She shares the idea with a friend who works at a men’s magazine and is given an anonymous editorial column devoted solely to her thoughts on the matter. But no one could have predicted the chord she would strike among women with her theory, and the column’s wild success makes Jane start to question her conclusions and open her eyes to what might be right in front of her.
The very contemporary, funny and insightful film about male/female relationships helped the handsome Jackman to show off his charming side as Jane’s serial-dating co-worker. Hugh found it very liberating to play someone like Eddie, the kind of guy who can just say whatever is on his mind and get away with it. He half-joked that it was the way all men would love to act if they could get away with it.
The significance behind the storyline made him look back to the time when he was single and still on the market: ‘If I think back to the people I dated or went out with, not one was like the other. I was not one of those guys that went for the same type of woman all the time. And I never understood why, when a guy is going to get together with a woman, they would want the woman to come back to their place! I always think what a waste when you could go back to her place, see inside her home, see how she does things. Coming back to your own place seemed kind of boring to me, especially when you’re living with four other guys in a silly little place in Chippendale.’
Like most Hollywood romantic comedies, the film ended with Hugh and Ashley sharing a freeze-frame kiss. Commenting on the clichéd lovey-dovey ending, Hugh shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘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.” Also, 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 it’s when the phone rings.’
Their kiss on film, like most on-screen smooches, wasn’t as romantic as it seemed. The pleasure at these moments is usually lost with the pressure of the camera crew milling around and the director shouting instructions: ‘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, make it more romantic, etc.”’ Hugh also commented that at the end of the scene, Ashley’s face looked a bit like Ronald McDonald’s, thanks to his two-day-old stubble!
Someone Like You did fairly well at the box office, with most of the critics giving it the thumbs-up, and it gave Hugh the opportunity to work with two of the industry’s funniest men: experienced director and natural comedian Tony Goldwyn and Greg Kinnear, who was known in the business as one of the funniest guys on the planet.
With the romantic comedy under his belt, Hugh was on a roll and nothing could slow him down. Reuniting with Halle Berry, he then accepted a part in the hacker-heist movie from Warner Brothers called Swordfish, produced by Joel Silver, who had also produced The Matrix. In Swordfish, Hugh plays a jaded super-hacker who is recruited by an outrageously wealthy and charismatic criminal genius (John Travolta) to write a program set to steal $9.5 billion from the US Government. It’s a mix of espionage, thriller, suspense and action, all thrown into one.
‘Professionally, my life changed a lot after X-Men, like, amazingly. The scripts, they started to come in, and all of a sudden I was acting opposite John Travolta in this Joel Silver picture. I was like, “Whoa, hold the phone!”’
Hugh apparently met the producers by accident at LAX airport on his way to New York when they were in the middle of scouting for talent to cast in the film. They raced up to the first-class lounge and sat down with him to talk about it. Hugh was impressed with the idea, so they handed him the script to read on the plane. He thought the first three pages included one of the best monologues he had seen in a long time for John Travolta’s character. Hugh turned to his wife and said, ‘I’m doing it,’ and she challenged him by commenting that he was only on page three. But he added, ‘Even if it goes to shit from here, it’s brilliant!’ Words that probably came back to haunt him after the film was released.
John Cusack and Val Kilmer were also considered for the part of Stanley, Hugh’s character, but ultimately, director Dominic Sena opted for Jackman because he felt the actor was less typecast than Cusack or Kilmer. It was rumoured that John Travolta had turned down the part of Gabriel Shear a total of six times before changing his mind when he heard director Dominic Sena was on board, and that the leading man would receive a reported $20 million for his troubles.
Hugh signed up prior to Berry, and was ecstatic when he found out that she was being considered for the role. ‘I wanted to email her the whole time and say, “Please do it,” but I didn’t want to put pressure on her.’ The two actors had worked together on X-Men, where they’d forged an on-set friendship. ‘The moment I heard she was doing it, I was like “Yes!” because I couldn’t think of any actor who could have that presence the role requires, as well as the acting chops. So of course I was so thrilled. And of course Halle and I, it seems like we work together at least once a year, so we don’t want to break that rule.’
Along with the pleasure of working alongside film veteran John Travolta, Hugh also got to share an outdoor scene with the beautiful Berry which features her topless. When asked how he handled the scenario, aside from claiming his eyes never left her face, he said, ‘To be honest I was probably more embarrassed than she was. But it was one of those scenes that took place over three days. The first day we were scheduled to do it in the morning, there were sun and clouds. Halle decided to sit there on the chaise longue the whole time, waiting for the conditions to improve. But it was postponed for the day.’
The next day wasn’t any better. In fact, the weather got worse. Even though they were shooting in Los Angeles, it was almost zero degrees. Even with the heaters set up by the crew to keep her warm, Berry was still freezing cold and covered in goosebumps. Filming stretched out into th
e third day and by that time no one really cared if she was topless or not; they all just wanted to wrap it up and move on. ‘So by the time we were shooting on the third day, I mean she was practically arriving in the car naked,’ recounts Hugh.
Berry remembers the time vividly: ‘He’s one of the kindest men I’ve ever met. I was very nervous and Hugh was more concerned about me than I was. He wasn’t just sitting around waiting for me to take off my shirt; he was the one who called for the set to be closed and he told a guy who didn’t need to be there to beat it. I had to shoot that scene three times, and thanks to Hugh it wasn’t stressful.’
During another sexy scene, she was clad in skimpy lingerie. John Travolta entered through a door and was supposed to say the short line, ‘This is friendly.’ Instead he blurted out, ‘OH MY GOD, just look at that body on that girl! Can we applaud that, please?’ Everyone looked at him in amazement, mouths wide open. He simply turned and added, ‘What? She has… It’s perfect!’
The spontaneous reaction from the superstar broke the ice for everyone on the set caught in the embarrassing situation, and reduced them all to fits of giggles.
But not all scenes featured Berry half-clad. Another scene, between Hugh and Halle, was for some reason virtually identical to one that they shared in X-Men. After meeting Gabriel for the first time, Stanley (Hugh) is seen throwing water on his face while Ginger (Halle) watches over his left shoulder in the background. It was a carbon copy of the scene at the train station in the original X-Men film where Hugh (as Wolverine) is seen throwing water on his face while Berry (as Storm) watches over his left shoulder in the background. No one would comment on whether this was by accident or design.
In yet another scene, Deborra-Lee turned up unannounced on set, only to find her husband filming a scene in which a beautiful young actress is performing oral sex on him – ‘There was a scene in Swordfish where I had a gun to my head, I’m trying to crack a code and a girl under the table is giving me a blow-job, all at once.’
They had been shooting on and off for two days and to make it seem real, Hugh told the girl to occasionally pinch his inner thigh hard so that his facial expressions would be convincing. After the scene was finished, his wife strolled up to the girl and said, ‘Hi, I’m Deborra-Lee, Hugh’s wife, and I think you’re giving my husband a blow-job.’ The actress went bright red and apologised, but Deborra just added, ‘Oh, don’t worry. You’re getting paid to do it, so enjoy it!’ Luckily for Hugh, it is one of the advantages of having a wife with a sense of humour who also happens to be in the business.
He also got to add stunt-driving to his list of expertise in Swordfish: ‘Stunt driving was a lot of fun to do. I went along for the class and the first thing you do in the car is get in with the instructor, and you’re up on two wheels, doing reverse one-eighties, and sliding into parking spaces. Within an hour, you’re doing all the stuff you thought you’d never do, or thought wasn’t possible.’
In addition to driving like a maniac on-screen, he also had to learn about the world of computer hacking. And in true Jackman style, he went all out in his preparation, spending time with real-life hackers rather than reading books on the subject. Like many people, he had a stereotype of what hackers were like, but found most of them to be racier, tougher and more edgy than he had imagined. Indeed, lots of them were into amphetamines and the whole rave scene: ‘I saw it as a very adrenaline kind of culture, very subversive, powerful, a kind of idealistic and rebellious kind of group.’
The actor was so determined to be just like a true, grungy computer hacker that he turned up on set the first day with a nose-ring, which took producer Joel Silver completely by surprise. He looked at it for about five minutes and all of a sudden Hugh could feel about 15 other people, including the director, staring at his piece of jewellery. Then Silver shouted, ‘No, I don’t want it. That nose-ring would be 40ft on the screen and I can’t deal with that!’ The nose ring was subsequently removed, never to return.
But the star did come clean on the fact that he may not have been the perfect fit for the role of a hacker as he was no good at all on computers and rarely, if ever, even surfed the internet. As a matter of fact, when Hugh first came to Hollywood, his lack of computer skills nearly drove his agent insane because the rising star refused to use his PC to research all the important people he would be dealing with. ‘When my agent called me to see how I was getting on with the research, there would be a long silence and I could hear him whispering “fucking idiot” on the other end.’ In the end the agent just gave up and did the research himself, handing the results to Hugh in person.
While Swordfish had a great cast and one of the most complicated and visually stunning opening scenes in Warner Brothers’ history, it did poorly at the box office and even worse with the critics. Some of them even went so far as to say it was one of the worst films ever made. It was then withdrawn from cinemas shortly after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, due to a scene which involved a building exploding.
To Hugh’s credit, he was saved from receiving too much flak about his own performance. Poor reviews aside, it was time to move on and like most romantic types at heart, he had always fancied playing the dashing gentleman in an English period drama. So when filmmakers were having difficulty in finding a believable Leopold, he jumped at the chance when asked to take on the role of the charming Third Duke of Albany for the movie Kate & Leopold. Commenting on the casting, director James Mangold said, ‘Hugh is an amazing actor and entirely unique in this day and age. He just has the essence of great movie stars of the past. There are times that you can see Errol Flynn or Cary Grant in him.’
Kate & Leopold was a romantic comedy fable, which also starred the wonderful and talented Meg Ryan. Two strangers from different times meet in New York City. Leopold, an impoverished English baron living in New York at the end of the 19th century, needs to marry a rich lady to help recover his family position. Kate, a successful businesswoman, also lives in New York, but in the year 2001. When Leopold falls into a mysterious time portal and awakens in the modern era, he and Kate meet and fall in love.
Before filming began, Hugh was nervous about getting the accent just right and not offending anyone back home in Australia: ‘Upper-class English men are never portrayed as the likeable leading man. They’re usually something else. I won’t go into it, but, growing up, that was my experience,’ he said. ‘The accent wasn’t that hard for me to do because my father’s English, from Cambridge, and my mother’s English. I’d been in England a lot. So, I got the sound right, but my dialogue coach said I also sounded as if I had a carrot up my you-know-what, as if I was judging the character, which I was. So I stayed with the accent, not the character, for about two weeks at home. It drove my kid crazy because I was reading him stories in that voice. It certainly drove my wife crazy.’
He worked with an etiquette coach, the same one who had assisted other actors on Sense and Sensibility, to ensure he got the character’s mannerisms just right. The aim was to have him appear poised and intelligent, while at the same time trying to look relaxed. He had sessions twice a day for weeks, where the coach would literally slap his hands when he gesticulated. She’d say, ‘Oh, that’s a dead giveaway, you’re so middle-class, Hugh.’ Eventually, Hugh learned to sit on his hands to stop them from waving about. The aim of this was to slow his mind and keep him calm. In fact, he discovered that gesticulating was seen as un-aristocratic in 19th-century England for just that reason – it signified a busy, cluttered mind, which was not considered becoming in the upper classes.
Hugh also wanted to find out about the people from that period, and so he did some extensive research to learn all about the rules and the customs. In the 19th century, individuals actually practised looking effortless in order to make the person they were with feel more relaxed and comfortable. When someone spoke, people would truly listen. Whenever anyone entered a room, everyone would stand up. And when someone sat down, anothe
r person would pull out their chair so as to make it easier for them to join the group and feel welcome. The objective behind it all was to take care of the other person first.
And his wife benefited, as Hugh learned to appreciate others more. ‘My wife likes it. She’s getting a few more flowers these days, but she still yells from the bathroom, “Put that toilet seat down, Leopold!”’
Hugh really liked playing the role of Leopold, and he enjoyed the way he and his character developed throughout the film. ‘But let’s be clear here, I’m certainly no Leopold in life,’ he quipped. ‘I mean, I grew up with English parents and my father being very English in terms of manners at the table, and there were lots of rules. I kind of revolted against it. And now here I am, doing this movie, and etiquette coaching really made me understand it all. It’s an art form, a system of treating the other person as more important than yourself. It’s the opposite of what I thought. I thought manners were all about shutting you up and keeping you quiet.’
While on set, he had the chance to get to know Meg Ryan for the first time. Like most, he was aware she was a brilliant comedian and a wonderful actress, but he didn’t appreciate just how extraordinarily generous, warm-hearted and down-to-earth she was. ‘Two minutes with Meg and you realise she’s a very special lady. One day while we were rehearsing on the sound stage and there was no one else there; I asked my driver to go and pick up some sushi. Meg came up and said “Sushi, I love sushi – where did you get that from?” I told her I got my driver to go and get it and she said, “You can just go and ask your driver to get your lunch?” 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.”’
Hugh Jackman Page 9
