If playing a gay entertainer on Broadway led Hollywood to question Jackman’s leading man credentials, his performance as a red-blooded cowboy in Australia has settled the argument.
Hugh Jackman’s face breaks into a wide grin when he sees the tray of sushi I have brought him. Diet features large in this Australian actor’s life. When he was in training to play the mutant action hero Wolverine in the X-Men films he was waking at 4am for his first meal and eating every three hours. 'This is a good way to my heart,’ he says. 'What you eat is everything. I always thought it was about lifting harder, heavier, longer. Now I think you have to eat more and eat leaner.’
We meet on a warm breezy day at his film production company, Seed Productions, based at Fox Studios in Sydney. He is svelte in a black Louis Vuitton shirt and jeans, his tanned face obscured by sunglasses. His thick nut-brown hair is slicked back, emphasising those chiselled features and well-groomed stubble.
Rather than sit inside to talk about his new film, he motions to a grubby table and chair on the grass opposite. In Hollywood Jackman’s reputation as the Mr Nice Guy precedes him. Rachel Weisz went so far as to describe Jackman, whom she starred opposite in The Fountain, as 'a sort of male sex God. He’s so beautiful and such a perfect gentleman at the same time.’
He has lost 9lb training for his starring role in Baz Luhrmann’s new film, Australia, as 'the drover’ – a lasso-slinging whip-cracking cowboy – and he only picks at the sashimi: he doesn’t do carbs after midday. Down-to-earth, with no trace of self-importance, Jackman is an intriguing combination of laidback Aussie charm and flashes of English thespian (his parents are English). He speaks fast in a sunny drawl, quotes Shakespeare and tends to ruminate philosophically on the nature of the self.
Jackman’s career is singular for its versatility. Now 40, he began in musical theatre – leading roles in Beauty and the Beast and Sunset Boulevard in Australia led to a year in London, where he first came to the attention of the British public playing Curly in Trevor Nunn’s Oklahoma! in 1998, for which he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award. Six years later he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the gay Australian entertainer Peter Allen, in the Broadway musical The Boy from Oz, which would lead to three years hosting the glitzy Tony Awards at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
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