Hugh Jackman

by Anthony Bunko

  Luhrmann is not just a perfectionist who wants everything to be just right; he is very thoughtful and leaves nothing to chance. Every day he would sit down with Hugh to discuss how filming had gone and talk about the scene the following day. Every day there would be a cup of tea in front of Hugh. It took him about three months to notice that the tea he was being served was actually his favourite. Then it hit him that sometime during pre-production months earlier, Luhrmann had asked him what tea he liked. Hugh had mentioned Lapsang Souchong, and sure enough Lapsang Souchong was there without fail, proving the director’s dedication to detail both on and off the set.

  ‘When I was doing Baz’s film Australia I discovered rowing. Baz said to me when we started, “You look good and strong, but you’re playing a cowboy and these guys are lean. I want you to lose some weight. Quickly.” I had a trainer at the time who used to be a rower for New South Wales. He said he would tell me how to keep all the muscle and drop all the fat. All you do is seven minutes, twice a week. You have to do 2,000 metres in seven minutes, which is actually the trial for the New South Wales team. So I do it - and it almost made me throw up, but it was a short, sharp shock. That’s probably the best thing for burning fat.’

  Luhrmann used Hugh’s sex appeal quite a bit in the production. He wanted the actor to set the female audience’s heart racing with a tongue-in-cheek washing scene out in the bush. Despite Hugh’s initial concerns, Baz’s direction made this a shot to remember: ‘With the washing scene, I did question it at the time. I said to him, “Mate, I’m not sure people will laugh in the right way at this and might just think I’m a complete wanker.” I had more fake tan and oil on my body than I thought possible, but he said if I went for it one hundred per cent then people would understand. I was very relieved on the night of the première when people seemed to laugh in the right way.’

  Talking about the washing scene Nicole said, ‘Oh, my God, not only did the women’s jaws drop, so did the men’s on the set when Hugh took his top off!’

  On the other hand, there was more to the Drover than sex appeal, he also had to be an expert horse rider and Hugh’s experience in Kate & Leopold wasn’t quite enough. Jackman spent several months in Texas learning how to ride among some of the toughest cowboys he could find although, this still didn’t prepare him for galloping alongside 1,500 stampeding cattle across the blistering Kimberleys in remote north-western Australia, where some of the five-month shooting took place: ‘Of course they asked about horse riding and I said, “Yeah I can ride”, because I had done a little bit on a movie called Kate & Leopold.’ But then he read the script and realised what was expected of him. ‘This is how they describe my character’s horsemanship, “The Drover, astride his horse, like a knight in shining armour corralling 100 wild horses at the back of the homestead, by himself.” That freaked me out to begin with, and on the day, of course, it was 200 wild horses, not 100! Then the next page said, “The Drover rides along on the saddle, pursuing a bull across the plains. He leaps down, grabs his tail and, with one fluid movement, he heaves his weight down upon it to throw the massive beast onto its side. The Drover takes out a bush knife, grabs the bull by the balls and slices them.”’

  At that point, Hugh realised he had a lot of work to do. He rode every day for at least a year leading up to filming and then every day while filming took place. He also worked closely with horse trainer Craig Emerton. On the first morning, while Hugh was learning to ride on set, Emerton brought him a motorcycle helmet and a full motorcycle jacket. Hugh was in an enclosed yard with soft sand and, because he’d been riding for a long time, he said, ‘Guys, this is a little humiliating.’ Emerton replied, ‘Just wear it. You never know. It’s an insurance thing.’

  The first time the horse reared up, it snapped its head back so fast and hard that it caught Hugh right on the helmet and knocked him off. On video it looked as if Hugh had being yanked off by a cable. He landed on his back, seeing stars. When he came to, he was glad he had taken Emerton’s advice and put on the ridiculous-looking motorbike helmet. Although Hugh’s head didn’t suffer too much, his wallet did because in the horse-riding world, there is a rule that if anyone falls off, they have to buy a bottle of whisky for everyone on the team, unless that person can say, ‘Just taking a piss’ before they hit the ground. Hugh was at least five cases of whisky down before he finally got it right.

  Unfortunately for the star learning to ride a bucking bronco was the easy part: ‘I remember one scene where Baz said, “Okay, Hugh, you’re the leader, you bring in the cattle and bring them down to the camera, and when you get close, take the mob to the left.” The director called action and all the cattle went the other way. It was hysterical trying to control those cows,’ he recalled.

  Yet nothing was quite so nerve-wracking as riding with a pack of real wild horses, called ‘brumbies’. And even though Hugh’s trainer warned him that he’d done a lot of work with the horse that he was riding, he couldn’t guarantee anything once it joined the pack. The horse guys had rounded up 200 brumbies – crazy horses that had never had a saddle on them – and Hugh was absolutely flying during the scene in which the horses stampeded: ‘There was so much dirt flying around that I couldn’t see in front of me, but when the dust cleared out of the corner of my eye I saw some horses break away. About a hundred were coming right at me. You know the theory that horses don’t step on people in a stampede? It’s not true. My horse reared up, scared shitless like me. I thought, we’re going over and we’re getting trampled. I closed my eyes, hunkered down and pulled him with all my might to face the oncoming horses. Because of that, they went around us. Then I jumped off the horse because I could feel it wanted to go with the crowd, and it did. A few years of my life flashed before my eyes. Afterwards, my sound guy said, “If you ever need to act scared, I’ll give you the tape.”’

  Equally demanding, but less life threatening, was the business of arranging Hugh’s beard every day; it takes a lot of careful tailoring to be rough-hewn. Indeed, Luhrmann is fanatical about hair: ‘I said to him, “Baz, what’s with all the hair thing? I’ve never had so much attention!” Which must have sounded a bit weird coming from a man who’d played a hairy Wolverine for the last few years. Baz said, “In a close-up, your hair is a third of what’s on screen. You look at the Mona Lisa, no one ever thinks about the hair, but that frames the face. About a quarter of that picture is hair.”’

  With this in mind, Jackman’s beard underwent critical screen testing, which led to intense discussions about the length. One suggestion that they settle for stubble was deemed a little ridiculous for a guy who lives in the outback. In the end, ever the perfectionist, Luhrmann sent for Maurizio Silvi, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the make-up on Moulin Rouge. Jackman recounted how Silvi was the only person on earth who could put a beard on someone, hair by hair, and no one could tell. ‘And what soon became clear was that Baz preferred my fake beard to my real beard.’

  Filming Australia was physically very tough for everyone, especially out on location. It was sometimes like being on Mars, with temperatures soaring to the low forties. The heavy costumes worn by the cast and the hours of riding and sleeping in tents didn’t help. It was not the usual pampered lifestyle that the stars were accustomed to.

  While Nicole stayed in town during the two months of filming, Hugh and Luhrmann set up their trailers on the edge of the remote set and never left. Down the bank from Jackman’s trailer was a creek teeming with crocodiles: ‘I’d been out there when I was nine or ten and just loved it. I slept in my trailer and loved being with a campfire every night and a cliff overlooking a river full of crocodiles. And I’m not saying I’m a Method actor, but there’s something about the landscape, the magic of that landscape out there, and just living there and working with the guys was the real deal.’

  Despite the less-than-perfect conditions, Kidman was very professional during the entire production, working herself to the bone every single day to get everything out of the scene.
According to Hugh: ‘Nicole’s incredibly glamorous. I’ve known her for a long time. Even at casual barbecues she always looks like a million bucks and has a great sense of glamour. But Nicole is also an incredibly tough girl who wants to do every stunt. Her first day out she was wearing a three-piece woollen suit. It was 125 degrees, and we were standing in the sun in the middle of the day for a long time. I rode up, looked over and said, “Are you okay?” and she went, “Yep, fine.” I said, “If you weren’t okay, would you tell me?” and she said, “Nope.” She doesn’t play that “Oh, poor me, I’m just a girl.”’

  When shooting moved to Sydney, Hugh’s son made his film debut in the background of a scene between Nicole’s character, Lady Sarah Ashley, and her Aboriginal surrogate son, Nullah. Hugh wasn’t working that day and so he was able to stand at the back to watch Oscar perform as an extra. ‘He was looking very serious because I told him the story and he knew it was set in wartime. His school was just around the corner and he knew when he finished here he was back to school, so I think he wanted it to last longer.’

  Hugh had planned to keep Oscar out of the film business but made an exception under the circumstances: ‘During filming I had this high idea I would not pull rank, so I sat at the back with the parents of the other extras for a while,’ he confessed sheepishly on his new role as a stage parent. ‘But then I found out they didn’t even get to watch the monitor, or see anything, so I gave up on egalitarian Hugh and came back up front.’

  It was rumoured that Baz Luhrmann’s obsessive attention to detail not only caused the project to go over budget, but created several scheduling problems too. The film took nine hard months to finally complete, which included some costly re-shoots. Indeed, the overly long production saw the birth of 15 babies to cast and crew members, one being Nicole Kidman’s daughter.

  To be fair it wasn’t all Luhrmann’s fault, and to add further to the production’s difficulties, Australia itself was not very cooperative either. On one occasion, the largest and most expensive of the sets for the film was completely flooded when heavy showers hit a part of the country that rarely gets any rain at all. On other occasions, filming had to be delayed for days on end because of bad weather or poor lighting. Every delay was especially costly since Luhrmann employed hundreds of crewmembers and had a herd of 1,500 cattle that needed to be fed and cared for. This completely drained the budget, which led to production improvisation. Luhrmann was forced to go begging for more cash and certain compromises had to be made; he even had to move the filming of the final scenes of the movie from Darwin, where it was supposed to take place, to Bowen.

  A worrying statistic of the Australian film industry was that before the release of the film, only 2 to 4 per cent of the films viewed by Australians were actually made in Australia, which is incredibly low compared to a country like France, where it is around 60 per cent. In the past, the Aussie film industry hadn’t had the budget, the scope or the size of the big Hollywood production studios. Australia did, though, and there were expectations that it would be a huge success in Australia and the rest of the world when it was released in late November 2008. Thankfully for everyone involved, it did exceptionally well at the box office despite a disappointing gross in the US. The film grossed $211 million in its partial worldwide releases and profits stood at just over $133 million. Back home, the hype was such that when Australia premièred in Sydney, one film critic described it as ‘the biggest thing this town has seen since the Olympics.’ Sadly, it didn’t catch the attention of the Academy Award Committee and was only nominated for one Oscar, and that was for Catherine Martin for Best Achievement in Costume Design.

  For Hugh, though, it was a satisfying achievement to work in the country of his birth, only 10 minutes from where he grew up, and to go to locations that he had always dreamed of visiting. In fact, he enjoyed filming so much in Australia that he filmed another blockbuster there a year later. As for the long production time, Hugh said he would have stayed on for another two years because Baz was so good to work with and there was such a special atmosphere about the whole thing. It was everything he ever wanted as an actor.

  ‘This is pretty much one of those roles that had me pinching myself all the way through the shoot. To be one of the leads in a film called Australia with Nicole to kiss and Baz to direct me is a dream. I got to shoot a big-budget, shamelessly old-fashioned romantic epic set against one of the most turbulent times in my native country’s history, while at the same time, celebrating that country’s natural beauty, its people, its cultures… I’ll die a happy man knowing I’ve got this film on my CV.’

  Hugh Jackman

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dancing with Wolverine

  No one can claim that Hugh Jackman is the type of person to sit back and rest on his laurels, and so it wasn’t long before he was looking to do something even more different to what he already had. In 2005, he embarked on a directing-and-producing career when he formed Seed Productions in partnership with his wife and long-time friend/producer, John Palermo. The inspiration for the name came from the notion that every little idea comes from a seed. To seal the partnership, Palermo designed matching rings for each of them that bore an inscription meaning ‘unity’.

  Regarding the trio’s collaboration, Jackman stated on the launch of the business venture, ‘I’m very lucky in the partners I work with in my life, Deb and John Palermo. It really works. We all have different strengths. I love it. It’s very exciting. With the production company I have no agenda, as long as it breaks even. It’s easier being an actor but it’s important to be pro-active in life.’

  The company worked in association with Twentieth Century Fox and established headquarters at the Twentieth Century Fox lot in the Century City area of Los Angeles. An Australian office was opened in 2006 at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney. Their dream was to produce quality feature films in their homeland of Australia as well as in the US, using local talent in all aspects of the filmmaking process. Besides producing, Seed also looked to represent filmmakers, actors and writers locally and overseas through a specialist artists’ management division.

  Hugh was well aware that being a producer was more than just a fancy title. He knew it would mean taking responsibility for each and every project, from conception to completion and beyond. And like everything else he does, he was determined to make it succeed: ‘When you get to a certain point where you have that ability or power to be able to be in a meeting and go, “Oh, I think we should cast this person”, I think you should step up and do it. I don’t put my head in where I don’t know what’s going on. Marketing, I don’t know about marketing. I really don’t but I might want to make a comment about a trailer, or why this, or why that. But it’s all so sophisticated on another level and I’m not going to be a pain in their ass about it, just try and learn and work with others.’

  The company cut its production teeth by getting involved in several projects. It produced the short-lived television series Viva Laughlin, a film called Deception (2008) starring Ewan McGregor, plus three cricket documentaries involving Jackman’s best friend, Gus Worland.

  Their first production, an American TV musical-drama in 2007 called Viva Laughlin, was adapted from the popular BBC series Blackpool and written by Bob Lowry and Peter Bowker (creator of the original British series). Viva Laughlin was an ambitious musical murder mystery where the characters occasionally burst into song. Filmed on location in part at the Morongo Casino Resort & Spa in Cabazon, California, it features businessman Ripley Holden (Lloyd Owen), whose ambition is to run a casino in Laughlin, Nevada. Ripley invests all his money into opening a casino, but when the business is nowhere near completion, his financing suddenly falls through. Needing an investor, Ripley approaches his rival, wealthy casino owner Nicky Fontana (Jackman, who appears to the strains of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’), but when Ripley turns down Fontana’s request for sole ownership of the casino and someone turns up dead, Ripley becomes the number-one suspect in the murder.
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br />   Unfortunately, Viva Laughlin wasn’t well received, and Hugh’s golden-boy image took a battering, with US critics lambasting the new television series. The opening line of The New York Times review said, ‘Viva Laughlin on CBS may well be the worst new show of the season, but is it the worst show in the history of television?’

  CBS cancelled the show on 22 October 2007 after airing only two episodes. The Nine Network in Jackman’s home country followed suit the very next day, after just one episode.

  The scathing reviews and the speed with which it was pulled from US line-ups within weeks of the première came as a major blow to the three directors of the company. ‘We are obviously disappointed, but you have to take risks in this business,’ Deborra-Lee commented. ‘Doing a drama that was a musical was always going to be a huge risk, but if you don’t take risks, you will never know. If I’m going to fail, I want to fail spectacularly, and it seems like we did.’

  Next up was something closer to home and even closer to Jackman’s heart. It involved a series of reality-style cricket documentaries, which aired on the pay-TV channel Fox8 in Australia. The series featured cricket-mad fan Gus Worland, who had been best mates with Jackman since they attended the same kindergarten. Together, they had moved to Knox Grammar School, paired up for an overseas adventure in a gap year before starting university, and acted as best man and godfather to each other’s children.

  Worland didn’t hesitate when Hugh suggested to him that he should throw in his job and help make the TV series that would be produced by Seed. The show was shot from a fan’s point of view and followed the fortunes of the Australian cricket team while they played against the other major cricketing nations in the world: England, India and the West Indies.