Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman is an actor, born 1968.
Hugh Jackman started in theatre and television in Australia and then spent twenty-four years playing Wolverine, from X-Men (2000) through to Deadpool & Wolverine (2024). His accolades include a Primetime Emmy Award, a Grammy Award and two Tony Awards, with nominations for an Academy Award and a BAFTA, and he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2019.
The odd thing about his career is the split down the middle of it. He is a trained song-and-dance man who has spent most of his screen time being feral. Les Miserables and The Greatest Showman use the voice and the stagecraft; Logan uses the other register entirely, and it is the best film work he has done, because it finally lets Wolverine be exhausted rather than cool. Twenty-four years of playing the same character mostly as an attitude, and then one film that treats the attitude as damage.
The dramatic work outside the franchise is better than his blockbuster profile suggests, and it is consistently about men who cannot stop. Robert Angier in The Prestige is professional envy taken to its logical end. Keller Dover in Prisoners is a father who does something unforgivable and keeps going. Frank Tassone in Bad Education is a charming man running a fraud, and Jackman plays the charm as the fraud. The failures are instructive too: Real Steel, Chappie, Pan, Van Helsing and Reminiscence all ask him to be a generic action lead, which is the one thing his particular intensity is wasted on.
Movies (54)
- The Death of Robin Hood (2026)
- Real Steel (2011)
- Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
- The Sheep Detectives (2026)
- Logan (2017)
- The Prestige (2006)
- Van Helsing (2004)
- Prisoners (2013)
- Free Guy (2021)
- X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
- Chappie (2015)
- Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)
- The Greatest Showman (2017)
- Flushed Away (2006)
- Les Misérables (2012)
- Rise of the Guardians (2012)
- Movie 43 (2013)
- Happy Feet (2006)
- Pan (2015)
- Swordfish (2001)
- Song Sung Blue (2025)
- The Fountain (2006)
- Kate & Leopold (2001)
- The Son (2022)
- Scoop (2006)
- Reminiscence (2021)
- Australia (2008)
- Missing Link (2019)
- Bad Education (2019)
- Eddie the Eagle (2016)
TV (14)
- The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (2014)
- Variety Studio: Actors on Actors (2014)
- Tony Awards (1956)
- The Man from Snowy River (1994)
- Ink Master (2012)
- Home Movie: The Princess Bride (2020)
- Projectorparishilton (2008)
- Chicken Shop Date (2014)
- Human Resources (2022)
- Who's Talking to Chris Wallace? (2022)
- Faraway Downs (2023)
- Variety & CNN Actors on Actors (2025)
- Koala Man (2023)
- Correlli (1995)
Where to start with Hugh Jackman
Logan is where to start, even though it is the end of a long story, because it works without any of the films before it and it is the only one that treats the character as a person rather than a franchise asset.
Then The Prestige for the best straight performance, an obsessive locked in a duel with a man he cannot beat, and Prisoners, which is bleak and slow and gives him the least sympathetic thing he has ever played.
X-Men: Days of Future Past is the strongest of the ensemble entries if you want the franchise proper. Les Misérables and The Greatest Showman are the musicals, the first much harder work than the second. Bad Education is his most underseen good film, and The Fountain is the strange, divisive one worth trying if the conventional picks land well.
Wolverine
Seventeen years in one part, which nobody had done before. The solo films took two attempts to work and then Logan arrived, a western about ageing and pain that happens to have a mutant in it. Deadpool & Wolverine is the victory lap.
The dramatic films
Jackman is a better dramatic actor than the franchise work suggests. Prisoners is the hardest of these to watch and the best thing he has done outside Logan. Bad Education is the late, quietly vicious one, and The Fountain is the beautiful failure.
The musicals and the family films
This is what he actually trained for. Les Miserables brought the Oscar nomination and he sings it live on camera. The Greatest Showman was written off on release and then became one of the highest-selling soundtracks of its decade.