The Other Hugh Jackman
He’s Been Lying to You (In the Best Possible Way)
There’s a moment in The Death of Robin Hood, A24’s new film from director Michael Sarnoski, where Hugh Jackman, battered and bloodied and stripped of every last shred of legend, just stands there. No quip, no heroic surge. Just a man accounting for a life that didn’t turn out the way the songs said it would. It’s covertly devastating, and if you blinked through his last decade of blockbusters, it might feel like a revelation.
But it shouldn’t. Jackman has been doing this for years. We’ve just been looking in the wrong direction.
Consider Song Sung Blue (2025), Craig Brewer’s utterly disarming film about Mike and Claire Sardina, a real-life Wisconsin couple who built their lives and their marriage around a Neil Diamond tribute act called Lightning & Thunder. Jackman plays Mike—not a dreamer, exactly, but a man of fierce, almost reckless conviction. He believes in the music, in Claire, in the singular dignity of doing something well even when the world has decided it doesn’t count. That’s not delusion. It’s determination, and there’s a difference the size of Lake Michigan between the two.
Kate Hudson, playing Claire, earned every one of her Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Actor Award nominations. She’s luminous in the role, and the recognition is deserved. But here’s the thing: Jackman is right there, matching her beat for beat, scene for scene, note for note, and the awards conversation sailed past him without pausing. It’s one of the more baffling oversights of the 2026 awards season. Hudson’s performance couldn’t exist without his, and his performance is doing some genuinely subtle, interior work that doesn’t announce itself the way Oscar clips tend to. Mike Sardina doesn’t have a breakdown scene or a triumphant monologue. He just keeps showing up, which turns out to be its own kind of heartbreak.
This is the Jackman I keep coming back to: the one who does the structural work while the showier performance gets the flowers.
The first time I interviewed Hugh Jackman, it was for The Prestige (2006). The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s sleight-of-hand psychological thriller about two rival Victorian-era magicians who destroy each other in increasingly baroque ways. I came in expecting the person I’d seen in X-Men: warm, funny, effortlessly magnetic. What I got was someone who had clearly spent considerable time thinking about Robert Angier, Jackman’s character, as a study in the corrosive machinery of obsession. Angier is the outsider—not the more technically gifted magician, but the one who wants it more, who will sacrifice anything, including his own humanity, to win a competition the audience doesn’t even fully understand. He’s not the hero. Hell, he’s barely the antihero. He is, in Nolan’s precise moral universe, a cautionary tale wrapped in a top hat.
And Jackman plays him with a kind of controlled ferocity that Wolverine’s berserker rage actually obscures rather than reveals. This is colder, more architectural. Angier knows exactly what he’s doing. That’s what makes it so unsettling, and so enthralling. The outsider who refuses to accept that the rules apply to him, who bends reality to his will and pays the price: that’s a Gadfly City story if I’ve ever heard one.
Here’s the ask: before you see The Death of Robin Hood, go find Song Sung Blue on streaming and pull up The Prestige while you’re at it. You’ll meet a Hugh Jackman who has been hiding in plain sight, doing the most interesting work of his career in the films that don’t come with action figures.
There’s more to this man than adamantium claws, and there always has been.