Barnum, which became a surprise word-of-mouth hit. Jackman headlined his passion project, The Greatest Showman, an original musical about P. One of his best performances of the past decade was in Denis Villeneuve’s operatically dank thriller Prisoners, but he gave his all even in projects that didn’t work, such as Joe Wright’s ridiculous Peter Pan prequel or Jason Reitman’s muddled Gary Hart biopic, The Front Runner. In 2012, he finally landed a significant musical worthy of his talent in Les Misérables, which earned him an Oscar nomination.Įven when his projects don’t entirely land, I appreciate Jackman’s eye for tough material, no matter the genre. He worked with more challenging directors, playing the time-shifted, lovelorn protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly baffling The Fountain, and the gritty cowboy love interest in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia. But it succeeded in teasing out Jackman’s broader potential.

At the time, Nolan said that, although he was initially drawn to Jackman because of his experience as a stage performer, “he also has the great depth as an actor that hasn’t really been explored.” Whereas his work as Wolverine had emphasized one-dimensional berserker rage, here Jackman was a recognizably flawed charmer who eventually strikes a devil’s bargain to achieve real fame. Jackman played Robert Angier, a talented magician prone to corner-cutting who values showmanship over craft-a clever subversion of his jazzy Broadway persona. Read: The shadow that’s haunting Will SmithĬhristopher Nolan’s 2006 film, The Prestige, which is probably Jackman’s finest performance, seemed to finally unlock him. While the other A-listers of his generation-George Clooney, Will Smith, Matt Damon-always found a mix of blockbusters and more serious projects, Jackman initially struggled to do the same, yet somehow retained his celebrity sheen. He hosted the Oscars to critical acclaim in 2009, an indication of his popularity with viewers worldwide, but his only non-Wolverine box-office hit at that point had been Van Helsing, a critically reviled monster-hunter movie. He won a Tony in 2004 for his work in The Boy From Oz, but Hollywood couldn’t find a proper musical project for him until years later. In an earlier era, that was the typical strategy for a new male actor in demand: get him in a generic rom-com quickly, along with a generic action thriller (in this case, the nonsensical hacker flick Swordfish).īut even though the X-Men movies kept succeeding, Jackman took a while to find his footing as a star in his own right. So his film follow-ups to X-Men were on the gentler side: the overlooked romantic comedies Someone Like You, where he played a charming cad, and Kate & Leopold, which cast him as an English gentleman. Though Jackman’s first major starring role was in X-Men, he was originally plucked from the world of musical theater, where his boisterously chipper turn as Curly in a West End production of Oklahoma! had won him plaudits. That success has let him collaborate with more daring filmmakers, pursue passion projects, and help make original movies like Reminiscence. Because he emerged with a genre-defining superhero role just as those types of films were taking over the industry, Jackman was for long periods locked in the public eye. For years, Jackman did not have the clout to launch a project as weird as Reminiscence, which serves as a solid reminder that he has been one of Hollywood’s most underrated stars of the past two decades. Yet those recurring baths also chart the journey of Jackman’s varied career: The many prongs of his stardom encompass comic-book heroism, sincere song and dance, and grim dramatics. Every A-list actor has motifs and themes running through their career, but Jackman’s has been unusually specific.

Maybe his best-ever work was in The Prestige, as a hammy magician whose signature escape trick involves … well, you know. In his Hollywood breakout, X-Men, he played the metal-clawed Wolverine, an amnesiac who was constantly flashing back to his genesis in a military fish tank. Jackman has performed this role multiple times, right down to the aquatic fixation. It’s a clever tale, anchored by Jackman doing reliable work as an antihero haunted by his sins. The twist is that Bannister is addicted to revisiting his own past, taking frequent dunks to plumb the details of a romance he had with a missing woman named Mae (played by Rebecca Ferguson).

In Reminiscence, the new sci-fi noir thriller on HBO Max from writer and director Lisa Joy, the actor plays Nick Bannister, a former soldier turned private investigator of the mind, probing people’s memories while they’re submerged in a big, futuristic bath. Hugh Jackman has spent a surprising amount of his career floating in water tanks.

Reminisce reviews