To go along with his stance, he narrated a video for the Global Poverty Project, as well as a documentary, The Burning Season, about global warming. In addition, Jackman gave his support to The Art of Elysium, a non-profit organisation founded in 1997 which encourages working actors, artists and musicians to voluntarily dedicate their time and talent to helping children who are battling serious medical conditions, as well as supporting the Motion Picture & Television Fund. He and his wife are also patrons of the Bone Marrow Donor Institute in Australia.
Like lots of Hollywood stars, Hugh now finds himself a regular ‘Twitterer’ on the internet, frequently updating his army of fans on what’s going on in his life. More importantly, he often uses this media to focus people’s attention on charity work. On his Twitter page, Jackman once posted: ‘I will donate $100K to one individual’s favourite non-profit organisation. Of course, you must convince me why by using 140 characters or less.’
Within minutes of his call to arms, thousands upon thousands of responses were received. Suggestions included Jackman giving the money to charities involved in homelessness, fighting disease, child welfare and towards developing impoverished nations. After much thought, he decided to donate $50,000 to Charity: Water and $50,000 to Operation of Hope.-
Charity groups were not deterred by the possibility that Jackman, who has almost 36,000 people following him on Twitter, could be making the pledge as part of a public relations exercise. ‘Quite possibly, it’s a PR stunt, but at the end of the day a community organisation is going to get a significant amount of money that they wouldn’t have otherwise got,’ commented Philanthropy Australia CEO Gina Anderson. ‘$100,000 is a large amount of money; he doesn’t have to give it. It’s fantastic. On the other hand, $100,000 sounds like a lot of money to be making a decision about based on 140 characters.’
For Hugh, it was more important that people saw him getting involved and not just giving money away. He wanted them to ask themselves the question, ‘Why? Why is he giving money there, why is that important?’ His aim was to encourage people to show passion towards a charity, to persuade them to get support from friends, to teach them the importance of it. He, and many of the charity organisations, are quite excited about using this new kind of media, one which connects with a new demographic and encourages personal participation.
‘I don’t know how much smoke I should blow up his a—, but Hugh’s tremendously talented. When you’re on stage, you want to be looking at someone who’s intelligent and who’s got your back. It makes my job that much easier, lazy actor that I am.’
Daniel Craig, aka Mr Bond
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Real Deal
2011 started out rather quietly on the movie front for Hugh but finished up very noisy by the latter part of the year. First up he stepped rather calmly into the role of Arthur in an indie production based on the historical drama set in 19th century China called Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.
Next came a very small part but in more familiar territory. With the announcement of the fifth instalment of X-Men films due for release in the summer, many fans were surprised and disappointed to hear that Hugh wasn’t to play any part in the production. X-Men: First Class directed by Matthew Vaughn aimed to be a prequel to the original movie and followed the lives of the X-Men at a much younger age.
In spite of this, Jackman appeared in a fifteen second cameo role near the end of the movie. During his on-screen time he delivered a single line which not only got the biggest laugh in the entire film, but also won the star a 2011 Scream Award for Best Cameo.
‘Basically I was asked a long time ago if I would do a cameo. Way before shooting happened. They pitched me the idea and I remember saying, “Does anyone else swear in the movie?” They said, “no”, and I said, “I’m in”. It sounded perfect to me. The actual line they used in the end, “Go f**k yourself,” was a bit of an ad-lib by me. The line was originally “f**k off”. We did about eight takes and I said, “Matthew, let me do just one more”.’ It was Hugh’s line that didn’t end up on the cutting room floor.
It wasn’t until the October of the same year that Hugh punched his way back into a big blockbuster movie. Real Steel is an all-action film based loosely on the 1956 short story Steel by Richard Matheson. Set in the year 2020, robot boxing is all the rage which commands enormous worldwide audiences. The story follows the ups and downs of a struggling robot boxing promoter Charlie (Hugh) trying to get ahead in the world.
He’s a little bit of a broken man,’ admits the star, ‘he’s disappointed himself and many people right throughout his life and he’s kind of used to that. He kind of expects to disappoint people. So he’s one of those people who doesn’t put himself in a situation to have people rely on him, you know, deliberately because he lacks at self-confidence or self-belief I suppose. It was so much fun to see how far we could take Charlie. This is a DreamWorks picture being distributed by Disney, and our lead character sells his son in the first 20 minutes. I really liked that. When we showed it to the studio I thought they were gonna tell us to reshoot. I’d already asked Shawn Levy, the director: “Are we making him too much of an asshole?” The studio thought we’d pushed it but that it worked.’
‘What’s interesting about casting Hugh,’ said Levy, ‘is he’s a movie star who you believe in the physicality of the role. But he has such a built-in likeability that he can play a complete asshole. Hugh Jackman spends the first half of this movie behaving in ways that are unforgivable, and yet we never quite risk alienating the audience because Hugh brings such a sheer force of niceness! Hugh really enjoyed playing a d**k! When that character starts to find redemption in the latter half, it’s tended to be a very emotional reaction from audiences.’
Although a film about robots bashing lumps out of each other, the main underlying theme of the movie is centred around the relationship between Jackman’s character (Charlie) and his 11 year old son (Max played by Dakota Goyo) who he hadn’t seen for years after walking out on his mother.
‘You know the way I’ve described it to people is Rocky 1 to 6 or whatever it is,’ Jackman stated, ‘remember Rocky 1, which was like 70/30. If you saw it, there wasn’t that many fights in it. And we’re sort of in the same world here. It’s really character story. At first I didn’t think it was for me. I don’t really like special effect movies. But I started reading script and I thought this is Rocky, more Rocky than Transformers, a great sport’s drama. It was the type of movie that gets everyone cheering and believing in it.’
It proved to be a great family film for the Jackman household in more ways than one. The actor was quite pleased to point out during interviews it was the first of his films his kids had seen. ‘It was such a joy doing a movie that my kids wanted to see. When I read the script for the first time I was reading it with him [Oscar]. So, that’s bad parenting basically! I was trying to do two things at once but he loved it and made me read it to him every night for the next 10 nights. But I was pretty much drawn in anyway but it was a nice bonus that he liked it.’
On the set Hugh soon became a massive fan and was extremely impressed with his co-star, the 11-year-old Canadian actor Dakota Avery Goyo. ‘Well, I auditioned with him. I auditioned with a lot of kids. So, I got to know him. And then we had a couple of weeks of rehearsal where we got to know each other. We were on-set together every day and we were really working together a lot. He was a dream to work with. It’s just effortless for him. Shawn [Levy] is a brilliant director of kids. He’s done a lot of films with them, plus he has four kids, so he knows exactly what to do. So, for me, I just got to really enjoy being an actor with him. He was kind of more mature and present than a lot of the actors I’ve worked with. The only thing he got nervous about - and I don’t blame him for it - was dancing in front of 5,000 people. I mean, he’s just an 11-year-old kid, so right at that age where you’d be embarrassed by that kind of thing.’
The film was set in the year 2020 which surprised many people who thought i
t would be based further out in the future. The idea behind this was director Shawn Levy’s. He knew the movie was going to be an underdog story, so he didn’t want the distant futurism of extreme sci-fi to overshadow it. He wanted the world to have that really familiar feel to do, so the characters would feel really relatable to the watching audience. ‘The cell-phone we used five or ten years ago looks different from today, but a diner still looks like a diner.’ That was exactly the image and the feel he set out to capture.
To get the film from concept stage to actual production took several years and many rewrites. Yet it really gathered momentum when Steven Spielberg came on board as executive producer. His impact was almost immediate.
In Levy’s first meeting with Steven Spielberg, the Jaws director challenged him to do something different. He explained that when he made Jurassic Park many years before, computers were limited in what they could do. ‘We built real dinosaurs that moved,’ the superstar director added, ‘I know it’s an old-fashioned notion, but consider building real, fully animated animatronics robots.’
And that’s what was done. With over a $100 million budget, twenty seven total live action robots were manufactured in various forms. To many this definitely gave the film a big advantage over other similar type of high-tech films around that time. In the fight scenes, they used and directed human boxers to produce the movements then use graphics to make it come to life as robots fought with each other. But in every scene in the movie where Hugh was interacting with one of the robots, if that robot wasn’t walking or boxing, it was a real one, some controlled by around 20 puppeteers.
‘I mean it’s so amazing,’ Hugh said during one interview, ‘my first thought was that this looks so unbelievably good that they aren’t going to believe it’s for real. It’s really exciting. A real sort of shock…when we first saw those robots, my jaw was on the ground. People will think they’re CGI but it makes such a difference for us as the actors and just the overall look. And I think what Shawn [Levy] has done so brilliantly is create a world that’s very real, very gritty, very timeless and robots that are sort of very everyday. I know what’s going to happen and every kid is going to be really upset that it’s not real because it’s so fun and you totally could believe that this would be the biggest sport in the world.’
It was the first time Hugh had worked with Steven Spielberg. Even though the director kept at arm’s length and left most of the day to day production to Shawn, Hugh was aware of the ‘Spielberg Effect’ from the outset.
Jackman described what it was like working with the great director. ‘He took a kind of secondary position in the room. He was a quiet character. He didn’t demand, he didn’t take all of the air out of the room. He was very generous. Of course he was aware of who he was but he didn’t lord it or use it in any way.’
He later recalled nearly getting busted by the police when the director called him soon after the film was made. ‘I got a phone call from him as soon as he’s seen the movie and he was talking to me for half an hour while I was driving around Sydney. My wife was like, “You’re going to get a ticket…you’re going to get a ticket!” So, I replied: “Hang on Steven…” and turned to her and said: “I want a ticket! I want to be picked up and I want to be able to tell the officer that it’s Steven Spielberg on the line. I want him to write that on the ticket so I could frame it!”’
Although always too modest to admit it, Hugh rarely lets himself get out of shape even when not making movies. But for this role as an ex-boxer he discussed with Levy that maybe he should be out of shape and have a bit of a stomach. The director agreed. ‘So I came in ten kilos heavier. I actually said to Shawn: “Man, I’m an ex-boxer, we should go realistic. I think I should come in big so that you can believe in him…but maybe give him a bit of a paunch to show how he’d let things slip.” And so I came in for a fitting a month before and he went: “Yeah, let’s not go so realistic…” Obviously, I was too loose, so I had to get back in shape quite quickly. But Wolverine has been a part of my life for 10 years and it’s much easier to stay in shape than to get into shape and the Wolverine shape is ridiculous because it’s so hard. So, even pulling back 20% felt quite easy.’
A massive bonus for Jackman was getting to work very closely with one of his all-time heroes, the great Sugar Ray Leonard, a true boxing legend in every sense of the word. Having won titles in five different weight divisions throughout his career, Sugar Ray served as a consultant for the robots and a trainer for Hugh.
‘The biggest thing Hugh struggled with was to let go and surrender,’ said the ex-world champion, ‘and drop his guard and be a fighter, and forget about Hugh and Broadway, and be the fighter and the trainer. That’s really difficult. With fight films and boxing films, the only ones that come to mind where the actor and actress let go and become that fighter were Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Fighter. They were people who had dropped their guards, and that’s very hard to do, for a superstar to let go of that thing. Once you do that, you know what it’s like to be a fighter, for a moment.’
Hugh trained with Sugar Ray every day and like everything he does in life he was a quick learner and a model pupil. He also called on a little bit of his dad’s experience. ‘He was the Army champ when he was on National Service. From Army champ he went up one level, a Golden Gloves or something, but in his first fight he got knocked out and doesn’t even remember where the punch came from. But he realised with that he was too slow and he opted out.’
Normally, the actor doesn’t find himself in awe of many people but Sugar Ray, a boxer who Jackman had watched fight while growing up back in Australia, was definitely placed firmly in that category. ‘Sugar Ray is like a freak of nature. I mean, he’s ridiculously handsome. He looks younger than me. You can’t believe he was ever hit. And he was very up-front with me. He talked to me a lot and really helped me out a lot…not only in looking like a boxer but thinking about the mentality of the corner-man, which is what I play. He was terrific. But the one thing he told me was that he used to know Angelo Dundee, a famous corner-man, and he would hire him two weeks before a fight. He said: “Angelo Dundee… he kept doing the De Niro thing…That look…without that, you feel like you’re going to fall.” It’s not only what they say…the way they look at you from the corner is everything. And Angelo Dundee just gave you strength just by the way he looked and [Sugar Ray] kept telling me that I must have that. Before every take he’d look at me like that. So, even though it’s a robot, it’s important that the audience feels for those robots and supports them just like humans.’
After the usual promotional tour, which included appearing on the WWF wrestling show, both fans and critics alike gave the thrilling and exciting movie the big thumbs up. Hugh went on to win the People’s Choice Award for favourite Action Movie Star, while young Dakota won the Young Artist Award in the Best Performance in a Feature Film – Leading Young Actor category. It proved to be a worldwide smash and a toy line of all the main robots quickly followed.
It wasn’t long after that Hugh got to work with his Real Steel co-star Dakota again when they both added voice-overs on the 3D computer animated action movie The Rise of the Guardian, based on the series of books by William Joyce, The Guardian of Children.
Next up was Butter, where Hugh played Boyd Bolton in a bizarre story about a young orphan who discovers her uncanny talent for butter sculpture in an Iowa town where her adoptive family lives. The talent pits her against the ambitious wife (Garner) of the reigning champion (Burrell) in the annual butter sculpture competition.
A film which Hugh was thrilled to be involved in was the big screen version of Les Misérables. The movie distributed by Universal Pictures and produced by British company Working Title Films is of course based on the musical which has had such massive worldwide success. A cast of acting royalty led by Hugh playing the lead role of Jean Valjean, along with Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter were hand picked to
bring it to life on the silver screen.
Producer Cameron Mackintosh was over the moon to get such a talented cast, ‘Even though I have dreamt about making the film of Les Misérables for over 25 years, I could never have imagined that we would end up with the dream director Tom Hooper, and the dream cast of Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe as the two great protagonists Jean Valjean and Javert. Not only were they born to play these roles vocally, but they thrillingly inhabit this great score. Producing this film with Eric Fellner, Working Title and Universal Pictures is indeed a dream come true and I can’t wait to hear the people sing at my local Cineplex’ the film is due to be released at the end of 2012.
Being part of the project satisfied his excitement for films and the adrenaline rush he normally gets from performing live on stage every night. The cast practiced together for around seven weeks before the three-month shoot began. ‘Every day we recorded every take live, so basically the feeling of an opening night on Broadway was happening every day of my life.’
There is talk of more proposed films in the pipeline to be released over the next two years. Selma is about Martin Luther King, Jr and the civil rights movement. Hugh’s been pencilled in to star alongside Robert De Niro and rock star Lenny Kravitz. Unbound Captives will see him starring alongside his former co-star Rachel Weisz, as well as Twilight and Harry Potter heart-throb Robert Pattinson. There are also plans to transform the Aussie star into a police detective who reluctantly helps protect a spoilt teen heiress (apparently to be played by Miley Cyrus) who is receiving kidnap threats, in Personal Security. And there is talk of a potential blockbuster in the works: a big film version of the hit stage musical Carousel, with Hugh to star as Billy Bigelow, the part he played in the stage version, as well as a part in another musical film, The Greatest Showman on Earth, in the role of P.T. Barnum himself. It’s all systems go for the modest man from Sydney.
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