Hugh Jackman Wants To Star In A Musical With Beyonce Knowles

From: icelebz.com

Hugh Jackman wants to star in a musical with Beyonce Knowles. The "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" actor teamed up with Beyonce at this year's Oscars, where they performed a dazzling musical medley, and Hugh is keen to work with her again.

He said: "Me and Beyonce. I will do anything. I am the one talking up all those rumors."

The actor also revealed he would like the musical to be directed by Baz Luhrmann, the man behind "Moulin Rouge!" and "Australia," which Hugh starred in alongside Nicole Kidman.

Meanwhile, the 40-year-old heartthrob says he was shocked at the success of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and feels privileged to have starred in it.

Talking about the movie, which has so far taken $175 million at the worldwide box office, Hugh told U.S. TV show "Extra": "I was blown away. I was so grateful to the fans and to everybody who came out in force and seemed to love the movie. I just want to say thank you to them. I love my job. I feel like the luckiest guy. Don't tell, but I'd do it for free!"

A Look at the Alamo's Secret Screenings to Come

From: Cinematical.com

In lieu of last night's hush-hush premiere of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot in Austin, to a crowd fully expecting to see mere clips and then The Wrath of Khan instead, we checked our Inbox of the Future (patent pending) to see what other shenanigans the Alamo Drafthouse might have in store for these coming months...

April 15th -- An admitted sneak screening of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was preceded by the director's cut of Australia, with Hugh Jackman himself collecting money at the door as "a favor to Baz." However, many stayed to take advantage of the opportunity to literally stone Roger Friedman in the parking lot. Several Austinites returned their bongs to their cars when they realized that this didn't mean whatever they thought it meant, while others were commissioned to restrain Hitfix's Drew McWeeny when he took to chucking nearby scooters towards the tied-up Friedman -- a sight which left AICN's Massawyrm in equal awe and fear for his property.

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Australia Clips, Pics, and Appearances

Video and slideshow from yesterday's Oprah appearance
http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow_20081023_australia
http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/20081023_tows_australia/1

Video of Hugh on the red carpet
http://www.etonline.com/news/2008/11/67501/
http://extratv.warnerbros.com/2008/11/jackman_jacked_about_australia.php


Scheduled Australia promo appearances:

November:
11/20: The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (Hugh)
11/21: Jimmy Kimmel (Baz)
11/24: The Late Show with David Letterman (Nicole)
11/28: The View (Nicole)

December:
12/4: Jimmy Kimmel (Hugh)
12/5: The View (Hugh)

A Wolverine Finds His Romantic Side

From: TheNewYorkTimes.

HUGH JACKMAN is a big, macho movie star. Got it?

In talking up Mr. Jackman in advance of “Australia,” his coming romantic epic, three executives at 20th Century Fox all described the actor as a “rough-hewn” throwback to Hollywood’s classic leading-man types, a “young Clint Eastwood.”

Baz Luhrmann, the director of “Australia,” which co-stars Nicole Kidman as an aristocratic cattle owner, also talked up Mr. Jackman’s manliness. “There are not many actors who have an ability to pick up a Nicole Kidman, throw her on the bed and ravish her with believability,” Mr. Luhrmann said.

Perhaps feeling that description was not vivid enough, Mr. Luhrmann added, “He is also excellent with a cattle whip.”

Here’s what Mr. Jackman’s bosses and colleagues are trying to say: Mr. Jackman, 39, is on the verge of megastardom, the kind that comes with Oscar nominations and demands for script approval. But to join the short A-list of male movie stars he must move past all that girly singing and dancing stuff on his résumé.

In Hollywood, where typecasting remains very much a force, Mr. Jackman retains a slight stigma. Isn’t he the guy who won a Tony Award for playing a flamboyant gay songwriter in “The Boy From Oz” on Broadway? Didn’t he host the Tony Awards for three years running? And didn’t he also produce and star in “Viva Laughlin,” that campy CBS musical series that bombed last year?

With “Australia,” which Fox plans to release on Nov. 26 in North America, Mr. Jackman will get the chance to prove that he can play a big-time romantic lead in a big-time movie. And with any luck, the film will be part of a one-two punch erasing any lingering worries about his ability to open a movie. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” in which he reprises his “X-Men” role as a hirsute mutant in need of a nail file, opens on May 1.

“I think it will surprise people,” Mr. Jackman said of his performance in “Australia” during an interview on the Fox lot. “I’m never that worried about positioning myself, and I don’t like labels personally or professionally. But this is definitely the straight-down-the-line, classic, old-school leading-man role I’ve been waiting for.”

Mr. Jackman was not Mr. Luhrmann’s first choice. Mr. Luhrmann intended for Russell Crowe to play the character, a brooding drover with no name who helps Ms. Kidman’s aristocrat drive cattle across a barren homestead during World War II. But Mr. Crowe and Fox sparred over money. (At the time the combative actor fumed to a reporter, “I do charity work, but I don’t do charity work for major studios.”)

Mr. Luhrmann, the director of critical darlings like “Moulin Rouge!” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” and “Strictly Ballroom,” said Mr. Jackman was initially under consideration for the smaller role of a greedy land manager. “I was keen to have Hugh in the film, but I didn’t immediately see him as the drover,” Mr. Luhrmann said, adding that Fox worried about Mr. Jackman’s marketability.

Fox grew more comfortable with Mr. Jackman’s star status after “X-Men: The Last Stand” opened in 2006 with strong results (it ended up making more than $450 million worldwide), and Mr. Luhrmann had become impressed with Mr. Jackman’s gung-ho attitude. Ms. Kidman, a friend of Mr. Jackman’s wife, the Australian actress Deborah-Lee Furness, gave her approval at a party in Los Angeles.

“Nicole came bounding in and said she heard I was talking to Baz,” Mr. Jackman recalled. “I said: ‘Yes, I’m very excited. But I haven’t yet seen a script. Tell me, what is it like?’ And she responded: ‘Oh, I haven’t read the script. It’s Baz. Just sign on.’ ”

Not long after, Mr. Jackman found himself enduring intense horse training in Texas. For the role he would need not only to woo Ms. Kidman’s character, who inherits an enormous cattle ranch in a remote part of Australia, but also to ride herd over 2,000 cattle and rope horses. In one scene he would need to jump off his horse and grab a stampeding cow by the tail. Another scene called for him to stand in the center of a corral and lasso a wild horse.

Mr. Jackman played down the rigor required by most of the wrangling work. But even he was impressed with the lassoing. “The horse went ballistic when I got that rope around his neck,” he said. “My gloves ripped, the rope peeled skin off my hands. I just remember being so happy that I did it that I didn’t care at all.”

Filming took place in Australia’s barren Northern Territory. (In the film Ms. Kidman’s character owns a sprawling desert property near Darwin, a small Australian city bombed by the Japanese during World War II.) The shoot came with dust storms, scorpions and, down the side of a cliff from Mr. Jackman’s trailer, a lagoon slithering with crocodiles. The shoot lasted 157 days in total, an epic period even for an epic drama.

“I almost fainted on the first day,” Mr. Jackman said. “Incredibly hot, incredibly remote.”

It was a long way from his days starting out in musical theater in Sydney, a time when he worked as a part-time clown at children’s parties. (In another job around that time, a pre-muscled Mr. Jackman was paid to stand in the lobby of a local gym as the “before” model.)

One early role came from the Sydney production of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” He played the prince. He went on to a starring role in a local tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” and eventually landed the role of Curly in an acclaimed London revival of “Oklahoma!” in 1998.

During that production, a permed Mr. Jackman had his first professional encounter with Mr. Luhrmann. It didn’t go well: he auditioned for the romantic lead in “Moulin Rouge” and was passed over for Ewan McGregor.

Mr. Jackman came out O.K., though. During the same time, he was a backup choice for the Wolverine character in “X-Men” and got the part after the original actor, Dougray Scott, backed out because of a conflicting film commitment. Aside from the “X-Men” movies, Mr. Jackman’s movie career has mostly included films that missed expectations, including “The Prestige.” Whether “Australia” will work is unclear. Fox hopes it will be an Oscar force, and the footage is lavish. Mr. Luhrmann said he was influenced by sweeping classics like “Gone With the Wind,” “The African Queen” and “Out of Africa,” which Mr. Jackman says is one of his favorite films.

But the film is commercially risky. Historical epics can be a tough sell, as “Troy,” “Kingdom of Heaven” and “King Arthur” have recently proved to the studios’ dismay. And Ms. Kidman’s recent track record at the box office (“The Stepford Wives,” “Bewitched,” “The Invasion,” “The Golden Compass”) has been scanty. (The film also represents a big departure for Mr. Luhrmann, who has developed a passionate following for his colorful visual style, which often places characters in over-the-top worlds bordering on fantasy. But “Australia” is darker and more realistic looking, and includes a subplot about the government’s forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families.)

Mr. Jackman always has a backup in “Wolverine.” Judging from his reception in July at Comic-Con, the huge comic book and movie marketing convention, the action film will be a blockbuster. More than 6,500 fans at Comic-Con greeted him like a deity when he made a surprise appearance to plug the movie. People were screaming and chanting; one woman burst into tears. “It was my little rock-star moment,” Mr. Jackman said.

People who work with Mr. Jackman gush about him, too, to the degree that one starts to wonder just how badly other stars are behaving. “He is the most centered, incredibly focused actor I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “I know everybody always says that in Hollywood, but I really mean it.”

Nina Tassler, the president for entertainment at CBS, said she had no regrets about “Viva Laughlin” because of Mr. Jackman’s involvement. “Working with him was one of the highlights of my entire life,” she said. Mr. Jackman, she added, was intimately involved in aspects of the project like script writing and marketing — rare for movie stars moonlighting in television — and said she found him humble and unassuming, an opinion echoed by others.

In wielding his charm, Mr. Jackman, whose offices on the Fox lot are located in Shirley Temple’s former dance studio and who watches “Judge Judy” in his spare time, likes to use humor. “You can’t cut my hair or my beard — but you can trim my nose hair if you like,” he said to a stylist readying him for a photo shoot.

And his looks — five appearances on People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful” list and counting — don’t hurt his bankability either, as the director Bryan Singer, who hired Mr. Jackman for “X-Men,” helpfully pointed out in an interview.

As for that “rough-hewn” label? “That’s studio-speak for a lot of chest hair,” Mr. Singer said.

How Hugh said no to soap on a rope

From:

Hugh Jackman thanks his lucky stars he never took a job on Neighbours 15 years ago. "It would have been detrimental to my career as an actor," Jackman admitted to PS yesterday, fresh from the hair and make-up chair on the set of his new action sci-fi thriller Wolverine.

Jackman hosted the 21st birthday party last night for the Actors Centre Australia in Surry Hills, one of the few self-funded acting schools in the country. "After I studied communications and listened to my journalism teacher, Wendy Bacon, talk about doing death knocks I was somewhat disillusioned about becoming a reporter … I had always thought about acting … I auditioned for ACA and got in, but it was going to cost me $3500, which I didn't have … but my grandmother had just passed away and left me the exact amount of $3500 … I took it as a sign from Nan."

These days Jackman commands multimillion-dollar pay cheques, but admits that studying for one year at the actors centre "ignited the passion for acting" within him. Jackman was offered a role on Neighbours after graduation in 1992 , but opted to continue studying his craft at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth.

"While I would have learned a lot about handling press and camera technique on Neighbours,
I kept asking myself would it help me audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company or the STC … and I had to admit it probably wouldn't."

Jackman said he and his family, fellow thespian and wife Deborra-Lee Furness and kids Oscar and Aida, will happily remain in Sydney until the end of the year, with work on Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia continuing for some time before its release in November.

"I have never seen such dedication and so much attention to detail working a film. It has been the best experience of my acting life so far," said Jackman, who plays Nicole Kidman's cattle-droving love interest.

As for Kidman: "She's a phenomenal actress … kissing her was the easiest part."