Australian actor Hugh Jackman was born in Sydney, New South Wales in 1968. He first began acting when he was a student, performing in musicals like My Fair Lady at boarding school and black comedies like The Memorandum at the University of Technology Sydney, from where he graduated in 1991 with a BA in Communications, although Jackman admits that in his entire three years at that university he never felt more at home than when he was on the stage. He first got serious about pursuing acting as more than just a hobby when he was 22, and soon after leaving UTS he headed towards the opposite end of the country and attended the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth.

Almost immediately upon Hugh Jackman’s graduation from the Western Australian Academy in 1994, he was offered a role on the 10-part Australian TV drama Correlli (1995), and after that short excursion in the world of television he continued performing on the local stage in Melbourne playing such roles as Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. Jackman would perform on stage and act in television dramas throughout the late 1990s, although he received international attention in 1998 when he played the lead role in the Royal National Theatre’s stage production of Oklahoma! in London. That performance earned him an Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical, and it was at this point that Jackman truly felt like his career could not get any better. He was of course wrong about that.

The only two films Jackman made in the nineties were the Australian drama Erskineville Kings and the Australian rom-com Paperback Hero both released in 1999. But the third time was the charm because his next film was an American blockbuster that turned him into a world-famous star. X-Men (2000) was a unique superhero movie about a team of mutants based on a series of Marvel comics. Hugh Jackman played a rough-edged mutant with metal claws who called himself Logan aka Wolverine, a character who was already popular in the world of comics and animation but was made even more popular thanks to Jackman.

Back when the film was being developed in 1995, rock musician and Misfits founder Glenn Danzig (who fit the profile the filmmakers were looking for) was offered the chance to audition for the role of Wolverine, but scheduling conflicts with his band prevented that from going anywhere. Although once Bryan Singer ultimately became attached to the project as director, he offered the part to New Zealand actor Russell Crowe, who turned it down but recommended his friend and fellow actor Hugh Jackman instead.

Wolverine, a character with few lines but lots of attitude and physical prowess, was a challenging role. But Jackman studied the work of Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2 and nailed his approach while selling the character of Logan perfectly and becoming the first movie star since Michael Keaton whose take on a popular superhero character transcended the adulation of critics, audiences and comic book fans.

Jackman would return to the role many times, including in the sequels X2 (2002) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), the time travel sequel/prequel X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and a series of solo spin-off films beginning with X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) which takes place before X-Men, The Wolverine (2013) which takes place after X-Men: The Last Stand, and the critically acclaimed Western-style Logan (2017) which takes place far in the future and sees an older and angrier Wolverine taking care of a young metal-clawed mutant girl played by Dafne Keen. This series of films has earned Hugh Jackman the Guinness World Record title of “Longest Career as a Live-Action Marvel Superhero.”

Other big screen roles that Hugh Jackman nailed include an aristocratic magician in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), a former boxer in Shawn Levy’s robot film Real Steel (2011), Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation of the 1980 musical Les Misérables, the desperate father of a missing girl in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), an alcoholic snow groomer and ski jumping coach in Eddie the Eagle (2015) and showman and entrepreneur P.T. Barnum in the musical hit The Greatest Showman (2017). Jackman’s voice could also be heard in animated films such as Aardman’s Flushed Away (2006), the Oscar-winning musical Happy Feet (2006), DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians (2012) and Laika’s Missing Link (2019), and he also killed it on the small screen in the HBO drama Bad Education (2019) which was based on the true story of the largest embezzlement scheme in the history of American schools and starred Jackman as the superintendent wrapped up in the scandal. That film won an Emmy and Jackman received an Emmy nomination.

In the middle of becoming a movie star and gaining credibility in the world of comic book nerds, Hugh Jackman continued to perform on stage in such shows as the off-Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel in 2002, the Australian jukebox musical The Boy from Oz in a run from 2003 to 2004, and most recently he played Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man from 2021 to 2023. His role in The Boy from Oz earned him his first Tony Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical. An award he won while at the same time hosting the Tony Awards, something he had done three separate times. He did such a good job hosting that award show that he won an Emmy for hosting the Tonys (I’m starting to understand why Dr. Cox from Scrubs hates this guy so much).

Next Hugh Jackman will reprise the role of Wolverine once more in Deadpool & Wolverine, which is set to release in 2024 and was a bit of a surprise to moviegoers when it was announced since Jackman not only said that he was done playing Wolverine after Logan, but if you’ve ever watched Logan (and I hope you have because I am about to spoil it), you know that Wolverine died at the end of that movie. For this reason, many Logan fans already hate Deadpool & Wolverine before they have even seen it, but Hugh Jackman has previously said that the events of Deadpool & Wolverine will not screw up the timeline of Logan. Of course, many Marvel fans are well aware of the multiverse by now and I’m pretty sure most of them are well aware that there are technically an infinite number of Wolverines out there, so this does not surprise me at all. Having said that, I am still excited for this movie because there are many things about it that I still do NOT understand. I also trust Hugh Jackman’s judgement when it comes to how to handle Wolverine because I know he cares about the character too. And if nothing else, Hugh Jackman is a highly watchable actor in every movie he’s in.

Plus, he finally wears the yellow spandex. Come on, that is reason enough for this movie to exist.