Wolverine seems ageless, but Hugh Jackman is definitely aging.
Mr. Jackman, who turned 46 last month, gets tired more easily than he used to — or so he said after giving a fuzzy answer during a recent interview. He’s coming off his third treatment for skin cancer in the last year. He finds himself looking at role models like Paul Newman and Richard Burton and wanting more for his career, and soon. He is attached to the next installment in the hugely popular “X-Men” series yet sounds almost sheepish about it, saying he wouldn’t mind if his role as Logan/Wolverine were smaller. (At least the movie character is still around; Wolverine just died in the X-Men comics.)
“In a way, I still think of myself as young, and there’s plenty of time to go, but then you realize that you’re 45, 46, and the idea kicks in about taking big challenges in your life: If not now, when?” Mr. Jackman said as he leaned forward on a sofa in a Midtown hotel.
He is answering that question for himself with little steps (a predawn workout regimen near his home in the West Village) and big ones, like quitting a long-gestating musical project, “Houdini,” and opting for an eerie new drama called “The River,” now in preview performances, as his next Broadway show.
On the surface, “The River” seems like classic Jackman: His character is a rugged, romantic guy — appropriately called the Man — who whisks his new girlfriend away to a cabin to fish and frolic. But looks can be deceiving, for Mr. Jackman as well as the play.
His age is written on his face (after a long day of work, he appears as haggard as the rest of us), and he is less physically imposing when he’s not in Wolverine workout mode: His sparkling smile catches the eye, not a brawny chest or biceps. And the play turns out to have a mysterious, even sinister quality at times. It’s not an action-hero romp.
“The River” also offered Mr. Jackman a chance to stretch by working for the first time with a major dramatist, Jez Butterworth, whose talent for exploring the dark and destructive sides of men earned him a Tony Award nomination for the 2011 Broadway drama “Jerusalem.”
Mr. Butterworth has written a role that may unnerve some Jackman fans, given the secrets that spill forth from the Man, but it’s a character that Mr. Jackman called “the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.”
“It was something I’d never had a chance to do, a great piece of writing that has a mythical and timeless feel, and a character dangerously close to myself in some ways,” Mr. Jackman said as he sat beside Mr. Butterworth before an afternoon rehearsal. “Whatever I’m trying to achieve in my life: If not now, when? And I think the Man is asking the same thing after trying to connect with a woman many, many times. He’s asking: Is he capable of it?”
“The River” is also a change for Mr. Butterworth, and his most personal work yet, awash in fears about a man’s ability to form and sustain intimate relationships. He began writing the play during the Broadway run of “Jerusalem,” a three-hour, 16-character epic deconstructing modern England through the travails of a lovable rogue (played by Mark Rylance). Inclined to go in a new direction, he imagined “The River” as a much shorter, three-character piece. (The play runs about 80 minutes.)
He wrote the first half quickly, up to a scene where the Man is confronted with a symbolic keepsake. But after that, Mr. Butterworth found himself sharing Mr. Jackman’s thoughts of late: pondering his next moves and wondering if they were good enough, worthy enough, to pursue.
“I was trying to write something very intense, and very simple, about our nature: how we try to be fearless,” Mr. Butterworth said, gently scratching the plush black armrest of the sofa, like a cat. “I don’t really take ideas and go, ‘Ah, this is a play, it’s about this.’ There just comes a point where the ideas increase in velocity, and suddenly you’re writing, or you’re not. With ‘The River,’ I found myself asking: Who am I to talk about being fearless?”
Mr. Butterworth’s longtime collaborator, the director Ian Rickson, fed him provocations from other artists: quotations written out on index cards, like one from Ted Hughes about how all poetry “is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of.” Mr. Rickson also organized informal readings of the play with actors, but Mr. Butterworth kept showing up with the same pages.
It wasn’t until a year later that he sat down and, in a single night, wrote the second half of the play.
“It was two weeks before my sister died of cancer,” he said of Joanna Butterworth, who was an administrator at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. “She was at our farm in the very last stages of her life.” He dedicated “The River” to her.
“Suddenly, I felt I could take the risk that the play seemed to be asking of me,” he added. “It felt like trying to catch your own self in the mirror not looking at yourself — that you could beat yourself to it. I wanted to create goose-bump moments like that. It’s the hardest play I’ve ever written.”
Much of his inspiration for the plot and characters came from looking at relationships through the prism of fishing, a pursuit he developed as an adult.
“I wanted to write about connections between people and how slippery they can be,” he said, a dynamic that unfolds for the Man and two female characters (played by Cush Jumbo and Laura Donnelly). “And I had thought for a long time that the connection you feel when you catch a fish is similar to the connection you feel when you fall in love: Physically, you feel sick, your knees go, you can feel your kidneys beating.”
“The River” drew critical acclaim during its world premiere in 2012 at the Royal Court Theater in London, where it was a hot ticket, in part because only 90 seats or so were available at each performance. Dominic West (“The Wire”) played the Man, a portrayal that Mr. Jackman didn’t see. He learned about “The River” when he asked his agent to send him new plays, and then read the script aloud with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness. Mr. Jackman said he didn’t wholly absorb the work at first, echoing a comment by some British critics.
“If you go by my English comprehension results as a student, I was a 68 student, a 70, and Jez’s work requires you to be in your 90s,” Mr. Jackman said, one of several compliments that made Mr. Butterworth blush slightly. (“Aw, that’s very nice,” the writer would whisper each time.)
Performing in a work by a leading playwright had particular appeal as Mr. Jackman was coming to grips with the travails of “Houdini,” which had gone through multiple composers and scriptwriters. “When a new play works, and the word gets around town, there’s nothing quite like it,” he explained. “That’s gold dust. I love feeling like I’m in that first audience that went to the Globe to see ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ ”
“I also thought of Newman and Burton, how they kept going back to new plays to stay sharp,” he continued. “Burton even went into the original ‘Equus’ on Broadway as a replacement actor, which is really rare for a star to do.” (Asked if he would ever consider being a replacement, he said there was one role he would do: the closeted gay father who commits suicide in the musical “Fun Home,” which is opening on Broadway next spring. “It’s an astonishing part,” he said.)
Mr. Rickson and Mr. Butterworth were excited when they heard Mr. Jackman was considering “The River,” but also wanted to make sure that his high-energy reputation wouldn’t overwhelm its lower-key mood, especially since they hoped that the play would run in a smaller theater than Mr. Jackman usually occupies. (His last show on Broadway, a 10-week concert in 2011, sat 1,200 people, while his last Broadway play, “A Steady Rain” in 2009, sat 1,100.)
Mr. Butterworth, who has his own film career and has most recently worked on the script for the next James Bond movie, said that casting for his plays “hasn’t always gone right every time,” so he wanted to think carefully even as he was intrigued by the idea of Mr. Jackman in the play.
‘Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway’
Hugh Jackman sings “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” in his 2011 concert on Broadway.
Video by 'Hugh Jackman: Back on Broadway' on Publish Date November 10, 2011.As for Mr. Rickson, after watching several Jackman movies like the 2013 kidnapping thriller “Prisoners,” he said he was drawn “to Hugh’s very big maleness and also that he could be kind of poetic.”
“If we had Sandra Bullock and Michelle Pfeiffer as well, that star wattage would buckle the play,” Mr. Rickson said.
Mr. Jackman clearly feels a yen for ever darker roles. He said that he happily submitted to an hourslong audition for Jean Valjean in the film musical “Les Misérables,” and that if he could play any other “X-Men” character, it would be the arch-villain Magneto (Ian McKellen in the movies).
He’s also intrigued that “The River” is in the smallest theater that he’s played since drama school in Australia, the 650-seat Circle in the Square. The production, which is doing strong business at the box office so far, is selling so-called “riverbank” seats that encircle the narrow in-the-round stage, so some audience members will be only a few yards away from Mr. Jackman.
“Being so close really requires you to be incredibly honest, because the audience can tell if you’re ‘acting,’ ” Mr. Jackman said. “But it goes both ways. The first play I ever saw on Broadway was ‘Hughie’ starring Al Pacino,” in 1996 at Circle in the Square. “I got up at 5 a.m. to get tickets. And Deb fell asleep 20 minutes into the play. Al had this long monologue where he was drunk, and I swear to God he was staring straight at Deb as he performed. He looked really pissed off.”
In case anyone does nod off at “The River,” the smell of real trout being gutted and cooked may be a wake-up call. Mr. Jackman does the honors during an extended scene. He is not big on fishing: He and his son recently went on a trip to Montana to help prepare for “The River,” and only young Oscar caught a fish. Mr. Jackman has been gutting and cooking them at home recently, though, taking a tip from a chef friend to prepare multiple fish in a single night at home to get the routine down.
“I had four fish delivered recently, and they turned out really good,” Mr. Jackman said. “It had been such a long time since I had cooked on my own in the kitchen. But at 46, it feels good to be trying new things, even if it’s gutting trout.”