Hugh Jackman

by Anthony Bunko

  Yet it was the entire experience, not just the show itself, which left its mark on her, and ultimately got her creative juices flowing: ‘I said to Hugh at the time, I said this would be a great short film, such a metaphor. We were so result orientated, that you know that was all about seeing the show, like getting the tickets and doing that, and the actual journey of getting there was far, infinitely, more interesting, meeting these amazing people.’

  She quickly wrote a story loosely based around their experiences that morning, and then more by accident than design, got money from Sting’s wife, Trudie Styler, to help fund the production after talking to her at a party. ‘I told her about the idea at this party and she wrote a cheque right there on the spot and gave it to me.’

  Miramax Films’ kingpin Harvey Weinstein topped up the remainder of the budget of $250,000 while they were attending a ceremony in Los Angeles. He told Deb: ‘Kid, you’re making a movie, and if people think I’m only giving you the money because your husband is Hugh Jackman, just tell them it’s called using whatever advantage you have.’

  It wasn’t long before the film began to come to life. Shot on a cold March morning in front of one of the theatres in central London’s Covent Garden, the cast of principally British stars assembled was very impressive: Michael Gambon, Will Ash, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Andy Serkis, Sophie Dahl, Alan Rickman, Joanna Lumley, Lindsey Marshal, Nick Audsley, the wonderful Maureen Lipman, and of course Hugh, who Deb joked, ‘Had to sleep with me to get the part.’

  It turned out to be a very accomplished piece, shot almost entirely as a 12-minute silent movie with minimal dialogue and rounded off by an emotive score from Australian composer David Hirshfelder. Standing Room Only proved a major success at film festivals and was shown on TV. It gave Deb the confidence to follow her ambition and sparked the idea to start their own production company in 2005.

  Many years later, they were both so thrilled when one of the couples they had met on that day, seven years prior, came to see Hugh in The Boy from Oz and brought along with them a few snapshots of everyone standing in line waiting for tickets. For Deb, this was a moment that seemed to complete the whole experience.

  After that, Hugh showed up briefly in another short film, this time little more than three minutes long. Making the Grade, written and directed by high-school student director Corey Smith, was produced for a segment of MTV’s Total Request Live and was shot at Nutley High in Nutley, New York. It was about two female students, both madly in love with their hot teacher, Mr Slattery (Hugh). But when the time came to take the final exam, which would determine whether the students passed the course, a drastic move by one of the two students resulted in an interesting twist of plot.

  Corey revealed that it took three hours of brainstorming at Starbucks with the two leading actresses to decide on the right actor for the role, and unbelievably they got the man they wanted. Hugh, in his blazer, tie and jeans, perfectly fitted the image of the maths teacher. Corey shot an hour and a half sequence with Hugh and the girls, and then shot another scene without him. Unexpectedly, it earned Jackman a nomination for the Best Actor award for the short film category at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival.

  After dipping his toe into the world of art-house movies, it was time for another biggie from Hugh, which came in the shape of yet another huge summer blockbuster, Van Helsing. This time instead of fighting rebellious mutants, he found himself donning a Clint Eastwood-style hat, adding hair extensions and pitting his wits against a set of legendary monsters including Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man.

  The action-packed film saw Hugh in the title role as Gabriel Van Helsing, the arch-enemy of Dracula and a character that had appeared in Bram Stoker’s original version of the Dracula story. It was a role that had previously been played on film by Anthony Hopkins and Laurence Olivier, although never as the protagonist. Originally, filming was planned for 1994 as a direct sequel to the 1992 version of Dracula, with Anthony Hopkins reprising the title role. In fact, the proposed film was put on hold for many years, during which time numerous elements of the story were changed. In the revised version, Van Helsing was younger, more adventurous and worked for the Catholic Church to get rid of any souls they regarded as unredeemable.

  In his Vatican-commissioned mission to take care of Dracula, the hero comes into contact with the hugely iconic Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. Even though classed as the good guy, straight out of the Logan school of democracy, Van Helsing is a very enigmatic character. Like the Wolverine character, he enjoys the heat of battle but is troubled by the emptiness he feels in killing demons that he knows still possess human souls.

  According to writer/director Stephen Sommers, the role of the monster-killer demanded an actor who should look like a fearless demon-slayer but still play to the hearts of female audiences. He needed to be tough and romantic; someone women would love and guys would trust. Sommers knew that Hugh had the necessary combination of skills, looks and talent. As the director put it, it was an easy choice to select the Australian: ‘He’s 6ft 3 and 210 pounds of solid steel. We were adamant about getting Hugh Jackman from the start. He was the only guy we ever wanted. How many guys out there are that good-looking and that talented? It had to be a man; it couldn’t be a boy. A lot of younger actors are really good but Van Helsing was kind of worldly, he’d been around. He had to have some weight to him, yet he was not of Harrison Ford’s age. There are not that many great-looking, super-talented guys in their early thirties. Hugh was the perfect and only choice.’

  Happy as they were to cast Hugh in the lead role, playing another comic-book adventure hero wasn’t really on Jackman’s radar: he was in the middle of the X-Men franchise and he didn’t think he needed to get wrapped up in another. In the end, the compelling script changed his mind, and he was glad that he went ahead: ‘I read this script and the movie and characters were very different. My only reluctance about doing it was that after X2, I wanted to do a smaller independent movie with Darren Aronofsky called The Fountain, so I was a bit reluctant to be in another big franchise-type summer popcorn movie in a way. I feared to go down that road.’

  He also knew that making such movies took a long time, a year of his life: ‘Then I knew I was coming to Broadway for a year, so do I really want to be doing that? Then of course there could be X-Men 3, then Van Helsing 2; that could be my film life. It could be a bit of a treadmill. Yet I know that Van Helsing is going to be great. I love the character and Stephen Sommers told me that I am probably the only actor to worry about being in two successful franchises.’

  Another major influence in his choice to take the lead was that most of the cast were from his homeland. The ‘Aussie mafia’ as they became known included Richard Roxburgh, who was in Moulin Rouge, David Wenham from Lord of the Rings and Shuler Hensley, who played Frankenstein. Shuler happened to be a great friend of Hugh after they starred together in Oklahoma! back in London. Backstage the old mates, often in full costume, would entertain the other cast and crew members by singing duets between takes.

  As for his leading lady, Stephen Sommers always wanted the stunning Kate Beckinsale for the role of Anna but feared she would find it too similar in tone to the vampire/werewolf film Underworld in which she had starred in 2003. Eventually her agent got Sommers to send the script, and Beckinsale immediately signed on. She was the last member to be cast in the dark, romantic adventure story.

  Hugh had never worked with the actress before, and although she is extremely beautiful he found her to be a lot tougher than she looked: ‘Occasionally Kate would pull the English rose thing, but then as soon as the action started she was tougher than all of us.’ He described one stunt that he was particularly nervous about when they were on wire 50ft above ground: ‘We were supposed to land on a mat with Kate astride of me and her knees on either side of my head. I did it once with the stunt double and she nearly landed on my shoulder. Then Kate took over and I thought, just a few more inches and I am going to get a knee i
n the face. We did it three times and Kate got it right every time like an Olympic gymnast, like bang, bang, bang. She’s very athletic.’

  Kate herself remembered the stunt and mischievously commented on Hugh’s reaction: ‘If you tell an English girl you want a crotch in the face, you’re going to get a crotch in the face.’ Conversely, if she had one complaint about doing the film it concerned how long it took her to be made up before each scene: ‘I was in make-up for three hours a day. It was a nightmare. The boots took 25 minutes to get on. Every tiny curl took so long.’

  Universal Pictures gave director Sommers $150 million to spend on resurrecting the legendary band of bloodsuckers. Not surprisingly, the special effects took a huge bite out of his budget. It was the first movie, other than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, to use the MASSIVE software program. Effects artists at Lucas Digital’s Industrial Light & Magic created a three-dimensional bust of Jackman’s head that would be superimposed into action sequences too dangerous for live actors. In order to pull it off, Hugh had to sit completely still and then they would animate the action sequence without moving his body. So, someone would be yelling out, ‘Alright, Hugh. So, you’re going to jump off a cliff and then you’re going to be taken by a vampire. Alright, here, Hugh, cut! We really need it bigger, man. It’s got to be a lot bigger.’

  For the first three months, filming took place in the countryside outside Prague. The crew created amazing outdoor sets that minimised the time actors had to work in front of blue-screen sets and the work they did was unbelievable. Indeed, the village created was actually left standing for some time afterwards in the anticipation that a second film or a TV series based on the character would be commissioned. The proposed spin-off series called Transylvania was pitched to NBC. It featured a wild-west sheriff taken to Europe to battle monsters, with occasional guest appearances from Hugh as Gabriel Van Helsing. However, the series idea was stillborn, partly because make-up, effects and location shooting in Romania would have been too expensive, and partly because the film’s opening weekend box-office takings were far below expectations (which also meant the proposed sequel to the film was doomed).

  All the interior shots were done in LA because they needed such huge sets. In fact, one set proved so big they couldn’t find a studio anywhere in the world where it would fit, so they built it in a car park in Downey, California. It was the biggest thing Hugh had ever seen, even bigger than the X-Men sets.

  Sommers, one of the old-fashioned kind of directors, set the tone and professionalism of the movie right from the start. He ended each day at 7.30pm with the same energy he had in the morning; he never went a minute past 7.30, but in that time he gave 100 per cent. Each day, he would pop his head into Hugh’s make-up trailer to see if the star had any issues or questions. ‘Trust me,’ Hugh insisted, ‘that doesn’t always happen. He made it really easy. It was almost frighteningly free of tension and there were no breakdowns whatsoever.’

  The star from Oz also found his director to be an incredible filmmaker. Hugh didn’t believe there were many individuals around who could handle a film as big as Van Helsing, but Sommers created an epic adventure from start to finish. ‘I had every confidence in what I could do with the role but not for a second could I pull off all the special-effects work. The more I know about it, the more miraculous it was when I saw what Steve had done with it. It was a step up for me because my name was above the title and I was playing the lead character, and that was the first time I had done that. It was a deliberate choice and I would have only done it with someone like Steve.’

  Just as he did in his other movies, Hugh insisted on performing as many of his own stunts as possible, although this got him into trouble when he accidentally knocked over a group of innocent Czech Republic extras who happened to be from a homeless shelter and hired for the shoot. Due to the booming film industry in the country, they had suddenly found themselves with 40 or 50 days of work a year, which was a lot of money to them. The extras would do anything and everything on the set to ensure they didn’t get fired. ‘They are brilliant actors,’ recalled Hugh. ‘In the movie, the turn-of-the-century peasants looked incredibly real, by the way. And there was one scene where the brides were attacking and there was this big mêlée going on in the village, and I was running forward to grab onto the legs of Kate Beckinsale, who was being dragged off by a wire. So it was very important for me to stay focused. But this extra ran in front of me.’

  The unfortunate extra must have been no more than 5ft tall. Hugh put his hand in front of him and felt him crumple: ‘It’s what Jonah Lomu [the massive New Zealand rugby player] must have felt like whenever someone came to tackle him. This guy just went tumbling and as I continued on with the take I was thinking, I think that guy’s in a bad way. I think he must have broken at least something. So I went to try and find him, and the poor guy was running away from me. I mean, he was terrified that the big Hollywood star was going to come and fire him and he would lose his job. I just wanted to apologise to him. And he ended up with a broken arm. In fact, in the course of that day I knocked over some old women and children as well as breaking this poor guy’s hand. And I said to Steve, the director, “You know what? If you cut this the right way, you could make me the most unlikeable hero in movie history.”’

  While in the middle of filming Van Helsing, Jackman was also beginning to prepare for his role as the flamboyant song-and-dance man, Peter Allen. The traits of the two characters couldn’t have been further apart, and for a while this created quite an identity crisis for him: ‘It was strange because Van Helsing had this kind of mask. He was sort of mysterious. He had this reputation with lots of testosterone flying around. But he was a guarded and reluctant hero. And you know, it’s the polar opposite of Peter Allen. Peter would’ve loved him, you know.’

  He was also unprepared in other ways: ‘I hadn’t done any tap dancing really in my life. So I had to learn to tap. I was in my trailer and had this wooden slab made for me by carpenters. And I was in my Van Helsing costume with tap shoes on tapping away in between set-ups. And I feel this presence behind me. And I turn around. And there’s Steve peering his head in the door then and muttering, “Do not tell a soul about this. No one.”’

  On its release, Van Helsing grossed $200 million worldwide and brought in $52 million during its opening weekend. The DVD sales alone were $65 million in the first week in North America, which when put in context, is more than half the revenue from all the theatre runs on Broadway. In spite of its viewing success, the film itself wasn’t at all popular with most of the critics and earned Hugh his first-ever nominated Razzie Award for Worst Actor in a Movie. Luckily for him, he didn’t win!

  ‘Hugh arrived with this Nicest Guy in Hollywood label. I had to hope all the cast were like these nasty English people and Australian people, who wanted to find out what was going on here with him, because something must certainly be going on, because you never hear anything nasty about him. They’re like, “Does he like women’s underwear? Does he have anything to do with animals?” We hoped this guy was a complete phony. We kept peering into his trailer and saying, “Hey! We just popped in!” And, I mean, there was nothing.’

  Kate Beckinsale, actress and co-star in Van Helsing

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Singer’s Last Stand

  The year 2006 witnessed the X-Men roadshow yet again rumble into towns and theatres across the globe. Except this time, the road trip wasn’t such a smooth journey. In fact, given the troubled history surrounding the third instalment, X-Men: The Last Stand, it was somewhat amazing that it actually made it to town at all.

  Things got off to a bad start when franchise director Bryan Singer jumped ship even before the movie had started its engine. Originally, he was committed to doing a three-film deal with Fox, which began with X-Men 2, but he and Fox were unable to agree on terms. During the stand-off, rival production company Warner Brothers offered him the chance to direct Superman Returns. Singer informed Fox that he was going t
o take Warner Brothers up on the opportunity, but wanted to return to direct X-Men 3 when he had finished. Fox representatives were allegedly outraged and as a consequence, his deal was terminated and British director Matthew Vaughn was hired to take over. Later, in a 2009 interview, Bryan Singer divulged that he regretted his decision to direct Superman Returns over X3. He went on to confess that he realised his mistake long before he watched the third film, while he watched it and after watching it.

  Things became worse when just six weeks before filming was to begin, Vaughn, too, left for personal reasons. It was rumoured that he had cited the huge amount of pressure put on him to deliver the film in a very short amount of time, a script he felt was flawed, and a large amount of interference from various parties as his reasons. Though he was only with the production for a short time, his work contributed to X3’s later success: he was instrumental in the addition of several key scenes and in signing Kelsey Grammer and ex-football hardman Vinnie Jones to the cast.

  Subsequently, Brett Ratner, director of the Rush Hour series and the Hannibal Lector prequel Red Dragon, found himself sitting firmly in the cursed director’s chair. Nevertheless, Ratner wasn’t at all fazed about being third choice. He brought with him a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve: he had spent time studying the script and the previous X-Men movies, highlighting all the things he liked about them and the things he thought needed improvement. Ratner identified three major changes: he wanted to make the new X-Men funnier, sexier and more emotional. The result was a film that provided a bigger slice of emotional engagement than the first two, yet still provided enough crowd-pleasing moments to be a success with the fans.