Sydney Celebrity Gossip Continued...

And jackman, it's fair to say, has earned the role. Or any role, for that matter, since in his lO-year film career he has played nearly every kind: the darkly obsessed magician locked in a battle to the death with Christian Bale in The Prestige; his Tony Award-winning run as the flamboyant, ultragay entertainer Peter Allen in the Broadway musical The Buy from Oz; the voice of a penguin in the animated Happy Feet; and tile woolly, adarnantium-clawed comic-book mutant Wolverine in the X-Men movies - an unlikely choice, as the comic books pegged the character at5-foot-3, but special effects do work wonders.

That kind of range is the definition of the job, but jackrnan, who turns 40 in October, extends his brand of Method acting to his body as well (Happy Feet excluded). Hence the nine straight months of daily yoga he practiced to pull off the lotus po ition for 2006's The Fountain
plus the additional three months' practice it required to be able to do it underwater - all for a movie barely anyone paid to see. (Yeah, he's heard of body doubles. Stuntmen, too. Not interested.) Or the total body transformation he achieved to play Wolverine, a feat so admired that jackman's trainer, Vancouver-based Steve Ramsbottom, touts a "Wolverine Workout," The former gym-phobe ("I never understood why people went to the gym; I thought it was just ridiculous," Jackman says) undertook a grueling, boot camp-style routine - up to two hours of weightlifting, five days a week, screaming along with Metallica and Godsmack - at the end of which he was benching 315 pounds and sporting that comic-book-hero silliouette. Ditto for Australia, for which the naturally lean actor needed to pack on tile thick muscle of an outback cattle drover.

"Hugh's amazing because he has such athleticism," says Kidman. "He could barely ride at the beginning of the film, but by the end he was a great horseman. He 'will make Aussie stockmen proud."

"I got used to it. And my energy level went through the roof." Chicken breast on the nightstand: Jackman doesn't do things half-assed, Not that he would put it that way. He is so modest he won't even take credit for being modest, chalking itup to national character. "I love the way in America people go, 'I'm good at making coffee. I'm going to make you some great coffee,' "he says. "Here you'd say, 'Let me makeyou a cup of coffee,' and if someone says it's great, you go, 'Aw, Ijustflukedit. Usually it's crap, what I make, but I just got lucky today.' "

He offers a variation on that theme when asked about his versatility as a performer, It's an Aussie tiling, he explains. "Look at the business here in Australia," he says. "With a population of just 20 million, you can't be too fussy. You have to be able to do everything. Russell Crowe did musicals when he started in indie theater. That may be some of tile reason Australian actors have done well. There's more versatil­ity to what they can do. Plus, we have a saying here: Have ago. We don't like people who play things safe. It's not enough just to be suc­cessful. You have to take a bit of risk."

HAVE A GO, YOU MUG: IT'S AS GOOD A SUMMATION AS ANY for Jackman's life thus far. But it's slightly misleading at the same time, because while jackman may sometimes leap 'without looking, commitment is fervent, and possibly even (see the underwater yoga) obsessive. Don't believe him for a second when he . says he just f1uked it.
J ackman is the youngest of five children of Chris Jackman, an English-born accountant, and Grace Watson, who abandoned the family and moved back home to England when Hugh was eight. It was by all accounts a searing split for the young Hugh, who was suddenly a latchkey kid, left to the roughshod care of his older siblings while his father worked until 6:30 or 7 at night. Though his youth was comfortable - "I was raised in a white, leafy, Connecticut-type suburb north of Sydney with the WASPy sort of private schools," he says - it wasn't, at least to him, normal. ormalcy was what he craved, which may be why his earliest ambition was to be an accountant like his dad. "I wanted to do his job," he says. "He had a calm power about him when he was at work. He had a secretary." As with most Australians, a sharp yearning to travel eventually set in. "Part of that is our isolation," Jackman says. Australia might be a big country, but it can feel like a small island, tucked far away from the rest of the world. If we were to turn this boat due east, we'd cover lots of blue - 7,000 miles of it - before landfall in South America.

"I used to spend nights look­ing at atlases," Jackman says. "I decided I wanted to be a chef on a plane. Because I'd been on a plane, and there was food onboard, so I presumed there was a chef back there. I thought that would be the ideal job." When he realized the grim reality of airline cuisine, he switched his ambitions to the min­istry. "My dad was religious," he says. "He was converted by Billy Graham, and he used to take me to things like that." The teenage Jackman found something appealing about those itinerant preachers: maybe their power to spellbind a crowd, their wizardly ability to draw emotions from people, the invocatory force of their voices. "For two or three years I thought I might want to be a minister or something," he says. An accountant, a minister: Jackman was a good son, toeing the family line, headed straight for mild normalcy.

But then something happened to HughJackman out in the outback. He was 19 and building homes for Ab­origines as part of a Lutheran mission in Areyonga. "Throw a dart in the middle of Australia, and there it is," he says. "Very arid, very dry. Red rocks and red dust." He met a general store owner who lamented that he hadn't had a vacation in half a decade. Jackman told him to take off; he'd manage the store, have a go. And he did, for a month. "The locals loved it because I'm sure they were nicking so much stuff, and I had no idea," he says. But jackrnan discovered a weird, unex­pected serenity out in the faraway. "Suddenly all the things that matter to a young man, like ambition and idealism, started to melt away. All the things you thought mattered to youjustgo. It's the land, that feeling of being part of something natural. It feels right." By this time Jackman was in college, halfheartedly intending a ca­reer in radio journalism. He deeply considered staying in Areyonga for good, but his father urged him back to college. "Butit was just to finish it off so I'd get the piece of paper," he says." ot that I had my sights set on acting then, but there was enough quiet in my head, I suppose, for me to get an inkling of who I was." After enrolling in a college drama class ("Evelyone knew the teacher, and it was easy"), the former aspiring minister discovered acting. It didn't come as a bolt of'lightning, or a burning bush, but rather a sense of challenge - the former class president and rugby player felt "like the dunce of the class, vulnerable and overwhelmed" - that, eventu­ally, came to feel like destiny. "I decided to give it a crack," he says. He was working the front desk at a Sydney gym when Annie Semler, wife of Academy Award-winning Australian cinematographer Dean Semler, came in for a sales tour, during which she suddenly stopped and leveled an uncomfortably intense stare atJackman. He presumedhe'djust squandered the sale. "You're going to be a big star," Semler announced, with a spooky certainty. "Don't worry, it's all going to happen so fast. Listen to me, I'm a white witch."

"At the time I was thinking, Please just give me your credit card," Jackman says. But the white witch was right. Jackman landed an agent the next day. Two weeks later he was offered a role on an Aussie soap opera. It was a plum gig, with the allure of easy money and quick farne, but to Jackman it felt too safe. He turned it down, choosing instead to hunker down for another three years of acting school. "I'd learned just enough to know how little I knew," he says. The risk paid off. Aside from a few clunky efforts and one near miss (the jackman-produced CBS show VivaLaughlin tanked last year after two episodes; he was passed over to play james Bond), Jackrnan's career arc has shot steadily upward, even as his range has veered steadily outward. "I have gone to the theater for 60-some years," famed screenwriter William Goldman wrote in Variety about jackman's performance in the Broadway show The Boyjrom Oz. "I was there for Brando in '47 Streetcar. But nothing prepared me for HughJackrnan." Now he's headlining the biggest production to ever come out of his native country, shouldering his homeland's history and character in all its celluloid glory. Quite a go.

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