Hugh Jackman has achieved legendary success on stages in his native Australia as well as America and England, playing everyone from Curly the singing cowboy in Oklahoma! to gay entertainer Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. On screen, he's taken a shot at everything from sleazes and sorcerers to lady-killers and superheroes. A pillar of the smash X-Men series as the team's angry, furry young man - the steel-taloned Wolverine - he's breaking off into his own Wolverine series. And in Australia, he holds down the leading-man position in a rare contemporary attempt at a sweeping national melodrama.
At age 40, you feel he hasn't yet found his defining role or, better yet, may not want one. What's certain is that moviemakers who need a fellow hungering to fill out larger-than-life (or just full-of-life) roles - parts that aren't just romantic in a hearts-and-flowers way, but romantic in their spirit of awe and wonder - should get on the horn to Jackman. He even has a romantic height: 6 foot 3 inches. And unlike celebrated predecessors such as John Wayne or Laurence Olivier (both of whom took years to break through in the movies and fully inhabit heroic parts), nothing about playing virtuous protagonists has ever fazed or embarrassed him.
Australia, because when you shoot for eight months, it's the kind of acting that requires keeping a center to the character."
Jackman had to rely on his wits and those of director Baz Luhrmann to suggest juicy tensions under the rugged surface of the Drover. "He's written as a quite archetypal character," Jackman says. "His name is the Drover, and here you'd call him 'the Cowboy' or even 'the Man with No Name,' " referring to the character Clint Eastwood made famous in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti Western" trilogy. (It's a resonant reference: In his earliest incarnations of Wolverine, Jackman gives off a hint of Eastwood at his most feral.) "The Drover is a symbol of machismo, and for a long time you don't really understand what goes on beyond the tough exterior."
For Jackman, peeling off the opacity was part of the challenge and the enjoyment he took from the project. "I find the less chance you have in the story to explain what you're all about, the more you have to know the mental history of what's happening to the character inside." Jackman spent time hanging out, riding with and, most of all, observing the cowboys of Australia's Northern Territory, who make use of modern devices and conveniences but still share the hands-on ranching-and-droving culture depicted in the film (which is set in 1939).
