BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Hugh Jackman was looking for material. He usually wings it on the talk shows, but Jay Leno wanted him prepared, and Jackman was just hours from appearing on The Tonight Show.
"I need a joke," Jackman said. "You got a joke? Seriously."
The 33-year-old Australian actor does not usually need schtick to entertain. He has charmed Hollywood with a good-bloke ease that seems genuine. And did we mention that he is profoundly handsome?
Jackman, who stars with Meg Ryan in the time-travel romance Kate and Leopold, has the package all right. He has been voted one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" two years running. Not that his family puts much stock in the honor.
"I remember my wife saying when I was in the magazine, `Oy, sexy boy, take out the garbage,'" Jackman said.
His career is catching up to his hunkiness. Strong notices in the Royal National Theatre's staging of Oklahoma! earned him the role of the Ginsu-clawed Wolverine in The X-Men (2000). It was a sleeper hit that spawned a sequel, which goes before the cameras in April. He then appeared as a Lothario roped in by Ashley Judd in Someone Like You and as a computer whiz whom terrorists try to delete in Swordfish.
In Kate and Leopold, Jackman's Leopold is a 19th-century duke grown weary of the society babes thrown his way. Ryan is Kate McKay, a corporate suit from the 21st century. They meet when Leopold jumps into a portal that leads more than 100 years into the future. His aristocratic manners do not mesh with modern New York, but the art of romance transcends time.
Ryan has down pat her harried cutie from Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail and other boy-meets-girl classics. The prospect of teaming with the long-reigning queen of romantic comedies was daunting at first, but Jackman adjusted.
"She knows the craft of comedy," Jackman said. "I may not be Tom Hanks to her, but you know it's gonna wind up OK."
Jackman is not as notorious as Russell Crowe or as hyped as Heath Ledger, but he is probably the most accessible among Australia's bumper crop of actors.
He has regular-guy roots, having pumped gas and played a clown at birthday parties to make ends meet before success beckoned.
He chats freely without false familiarity. His wife, actress Deborra-Lee Furness, has warned him that sarcasm doesn't translate in print. Jackman paid the price recently for a joke he made about his bachelor days. When an interviewer asked him how many women he'd been with, Jackman cracked, "Less than a thousand." The next day on the Internet, he was quoted as saying he had bedded 750 women.
