Hugh Jackman: The Greatest Showman Was Tougher Than Wolverine

Hugh Jackman spent years building Wolverine’s body. Singing and dancing his way through The Greatest Showman proved an even tougher challenge—and brought him back to the kind of performing he loves.

The critics were cool when The Greatest Showman opened. Audiences had other ideas. Nine weeks into its release, the musical continues to draw cinemagoers, while its soundtrack has become an international success. The gap between critical judgement and public enthusiasm could hardly be clearer.

For Hugh Jackman, who stars as P. T. Barnum and helped bring the project to the screen, that response goes to the heart of what the film was intended to do. Barnum understood how to make people feel they had witnessed something extraordinary. Jackman wanted audiences to leave the cinema with a comparable sense of pleasure.

When we meet in Los Angeles, he talks about showmanship as something that extends far beyond the stage. Barnum’s gift, in his account, lay not only in performing but in imagining the entire experience of a show.

“What really distinguished him was how he put a show together, how he thought differently from other people, how he made people feel while watching it, and how he made them leave happy,” Jackman says. “That is what we wanted to achieve in the film.”

The outsider who wanted to belong

Inspired by Barnum’s life, the film begins with a man losing his job and searching for a way to support his family. His first venture, a museum of wax figures, proves insufficient. Then he assembles a company of performers whose appearances have made them objects of ridicule or exclusion.

The attraction brings crowds, but it also provokes hostility. As Barnum urges the performers to keep going, the film develops its central idea: the difference for which somebody is rejected can also become the source of their value.

“The message of this film is to be yourself, and that what makes you different makes you special,” Jackman says. “Barnum was very good at communicating that message to other people.”

Yet the man offering that encouragement cannot easily accept himself. The son of a tailor, he is painfully conscious of class and of the contempt with which established society regards him. His desire for respectability leads him towards the playwright Phillip Carlyle and then the celebrated Swedish singer Jenny Lind.

Lind’s tour promises a different audience and a different status. Barnum begins to distance himself from the people who made his original success possible. The pursuit of acceptance becomes another form of exclusion.

“Barnum grew up in extreme poverty and real discrimination, and that drove him,” Jackman says. “It may have been the reason for his success. But at some point you have to move from being driven to being able to relax, to realise that perhaps you have climbed the mountain and are there to enjoy it too, not just to fight and scratch.”

He recognises something of that restlessness in himself. Ambition has been useful, but the inability to feel satisfied has a cost.

“I have always been ambitious, and in the past I was rarely satisfied with what I had achieved,” he says. “That is good as a motivator, but it is not good for enjoying life.”

Why a musical felt like climbing Everest

To many cinemagoers, Jackman is first and foremost Wolverine. His professional roots, however, are in musical theatre. He performed on stage in Australia before becoming a Hollywood star, returned to Broadway and won a Tony for The Boy from Oz.

His performance as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables brought him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Even so, creating another screen musical was far from straightforward. The Greatest Showman took years of development and persuasion.

The project had been envisaged as a drama. Jackman helped push it towards a musical, eventually demonstrating songs and scenes to studio executives in New York. Rather than relying on a familiar Broadway production, the filmmakers were asking an audience to embrace new songs and a new version of a historical figure.

“I think musicals are the Mount Everest of filmmaking,” he says. “Especially an original musical, where you are writing a song that has not already been performed on Broadway and is not drawn from something people know.”

That uncertainty made the undertaking feel appropriate to Barnum, a man whose career was built on wagers about what an audience might want. But it also complicated the task. People believe they already know Barnum, and different viewers arrive with different expectations.

“You could make thirty-six films about him,” Jackman says, “and perhaps Barnum would think that every one of them represented him.”

He is clear that this particular film should not be mistaken for a comprehensive biography. It selects and reshapes material from Barnum’s life to tell a story about acceptance, ambition and belonging.

“The film is not a biography,” he says. “It draws a great deal from his life, but its bigger subject is acceptance. I think it is also about the emergence of modern America: the idea that a person’s value is not measured by their family or social class, but by their ideas, talent and work.”

What Barnum and Wolverine have in common

There is a surprising connection between that theme and the X-Men films. Their genetically different characters possess extraordinary abilities, but those differences also provoke fear, hostility and persecution. The outsiders in The Greatest Showman are asking for a place in society too.

Wolverine made Jackman a global star. He played the character for seventeen years, culminating in Logan, which gave the superhero’s story a sombre and unusually intimate conclusion. Speaking now, he describes leaving the role as both a satisfaction and a loss.

“Wolverine will live with me forever,” he says. “You don’t forget those things, especially the fundamental roles that are the roots of your career. In a creative way, they become part of your identity.”

The sweetness lies in having been given such a role and in everything he gained from it. The bitterness is that the final performance is the one of which he is proudest.

“When I watched it on screen, I thought: I love this person. I wished this was the beginning now. I am going to miss him,” he says. “I really do miss playing the role. But at some point you have to let go of that feeling.”

Fitter than Wolverine

The physical discipline required to play Wolverine became part of Jackman’s public image. Yet he tells me that preparing Barnum was harder in important respects, both physically and emotionally.

He spent two years preparing his voice for a score that combines pop influences with the demands of musical theatre. His Broadway experience was an advantage, but it did not remove the need to change how he sang.

“I wanted to get that right because I had been a Broadway singer, which was more classical,” he explains. “This was a different sound, and there was dancing as well, so we had to train for a very long time.”

Then comes the comparison that might surprise anyone who associates fitness solely with Wolverine’s muscular frame.

“I was probably fitter playing Barnum than I was playing Wolverine,” he says, laughing.

The film’s popular success has not translated into a sweeping awards campaign. Its sole Oscar nomination is for the song This Is Me. But the enthusiasm of audiences has given Jackman another kind of vindication. After years of developing a project built around the pleasure of performance, people are returning for the songs, the spectacle and the invitation to recognise themselves in the outsiders on screen.