How Hugh Jackman Raises The Bar

Hugh Jackman is the manifestation of raw masculinity and confidence – essential traits for roles ranging from Wolverine to Jean Valjean. Standing 6’3”, he’s actually larger than his mutant counterpart. He can sing, dance, act, and intimidate. However in his latest work, “The Greatest Showman,” he embodies his renaissance characteristics like we’ve never seen before. Any project that takes seven and a half years of grinding to complete, takes grit, and Jackman has it in wheelbarrows.

Q: You must have had so much fun working on “The Greatest Showman”

My favorite time, to be honest, was the rehearsals. I love rehearsing, but singing and dancing for ten hours a day for ten weeks sounds like a lot, but I loved it. As soon as we were shooting, another level of pressure came on, but it was a dream job. If I can’t have fun with something I create, there is a problem.

Q: Tell us about the genesis of this project. Who came up with it?

It was Larry Mark’s idea. We had just done the Oscars together and he came and had a meeting with me in 2009. And he said, we should do P.T. Barnum as a story, as an original idea – I had a production company at the time. We had a lot of meetings like that, and I thought it was a ten percent chance at best. An original movie musical had not been done in 23 years. Sorry for the pun, but there were a lot of hoops to jump through. When we got Michael Gracey to direct it, I knew it would work. It was still a big risk at the time. But we also knew “La La Land” was coming out as well.

Read the rest of the exclusive NOBLEMAN interview with Hugh Jackman in Issue 5 now available here.