In addition to pulling off the brooding action star thing from time to time, Hugh Jackman is also very much a song and dance man. He won numerous awards, including the Tony, for his starring turn in the stage musical The Boy from Oz, and later this month Jackman is returning to Broadway for a 10-week run of Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway. Steve recently got the chance to speak to the actor about his upcoming sci-fi pic Real Steel, but the actor also talked about returning to Broadway, how he chose the songs heâs performing, his love for the stage, and he also gave an update on the P.T. Barnum-style movie musical The Greatest Showman on Earth. Hit the jump to see what the actor had to say.Jackman talked about the motivation behind putting together this 10-week run of shows, and what kinds of songs he chose to perform:
âIt took me a year [to choose which songs I would perform]. My overall goal was that I desperately wanted to sing these songs. So the whole show would have a thing for me where if Iâm busy and letâs say I have two weeks off, I would be like âI really want to go do this show for a week.â rather than âOkay. Iâm doing this show.â It was really important to me to really choose stuff that I love and not just stuff that I thought people would love. I have an eclectic kind ofâ¦there is some musical theater from stuff that Iâve done and thereâs stuff that I have wanted to do that I havenât done. There are also standards, rock and roll, and a little bit of everything.â
The thesp also talked about what drew him back to Broadway and the experience of performing there contrasted with other theaters:
âIâm lucky to have worked in theater all over the world, but thereâs something magical about Broadway. The audiences are smart, theyâre educated. They go in ready and theyâre up for it, theyâre up for the party. Itâs a whole different atmosphere. A lot of the other places where you do theater you have a feeling that you have to win them over. Thereâs little bit of them sitting on their hands. In Broadway, if they donât like you, theyâll let you know early on. But then theyâre like âAlright. Letâs go. Weâre ready for a good night.â Thereâs some combination between that, the history, the proximity of all of these theaters, and the community that exists in the theater â itâs just amazing. Thereâs actually footage of me somewhere in 1996 when I was doing a musical down in Australia. They sent me to New York to do a column piece, it was like an Australian 60 Minutes. Thereâs footage of me in Times Square being a dickhead going, âCan you believe this?! Look at this! Maybe one dayâ¦â So you have to be careful what you wish for.â
Finally, Jackman gave a brief update on the P.T. Barnum-esque movie musical The Greatest Showman on Earth, saying production is probably still a ways off:
â[Itâs] this idea of a Barnum type character, that story about him, which Iâve always found fascinating, but not using the Cy Coleman music that was there, finding new music, finding a different way to tell the story. That came to me and I thought, âThis is a great idea.â I thought it would be a great part to play. There is a script, but there is no music yet. So itâs fair to say that itâs a long ways off.â
So it sounds like the well-rounded actor is plenty busy. After his 10-week run on Broadway, the actor will move to Tom Hooperâs adaptation of Les Miserables. If you missed his comments on that movie musical, including the possibility of shooting in 3D, click here. Also, click here to see what Jackman had to say about his X-Men: First Class cameo, and click here for his comments on The Wolverine script.