The role Hugh Jackman has always dreamed of playing: “The one for me”
You might think that once actors have become huge international movie stars, they stop fantasising about what they might like to be when they grow up, but that’s not always the case, as Hugh Jackman will attest to.
The Australian star is one of the most successful A-listers in Hollywood, bringing in $20m per movie and has a total career gross box office of something insane like $10bn. So it’s fair to say he’s accomplished a fair bit in his 25 years making films. But that doesn’t mean he’s ticked all the boxes on his wishlist, because one, and to a lesser extent two, roles have always evaded him.
When asked about the one part he had always dreamed of playing, Jackman told chat show host Stephen Colbert: “King Lear. That would be the one for me. And Bill Murray’s character in Caddyshack.”
Pressed to decide which one would be more challenging, Jackman added: “The Groundskeeper for sure.”
Jackman’s grounding was in theatre back in the ‘90s so it probably makes sense that someone with a drama school background would be tempted by one of the stage’s most famous roles. In fact, film fans may not even be aware of just how stellar Jackman’s theatre credentials are – he has performed extensively on London’s West End and on Broadway, winning a Laurence Olivier award nomination and a Tony award. Even at the start, Jackman said that he attended drama school in order to one day audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Quite why nobody has given Jackman a chance to play the fabled British King, who knows, given he seems to pretty much excel at every kind of role he takes on, from superheroes to musicals to vengeance seeking fathers. But even as recently as 2017 he was speaking about how he still wants to get to do a Shakespearean role, ideally under the direction of the RSC’s Trevor Nunn. Plus you would think with the kind of influence he wields in Hollywood he could just have a word with a casting director and ask if he could do Lear and/or Carl Spackler the greenskeeper from Caddyshack.
On second thoughts, that would require a remake of the 1980 classic Rodney Dangerfield golfing comedy, something that has long been rumoured but has yet to come to fruition. The closest to it came in 1988 with the sequel Caddyshack II, but honestly the less said about that the better.
As for King Lear, Jackman did make a cameo as King Arthur in the Ben Stiller comedy Night at the Museum, but that doesn’t really count, so he still has plenty of work to do there. But he’s not short of work; he will soon be taking on another classic role in the form of Robin Hood on a new movie called The Death of Robin Hood alongside Jodie Comer, plus he’ll be part of an ensemble cast of a film called The Sheep Detectives next year, which is a mystery comedy, and presumably has something to do with sheep.
What probably makes it all the more galling for Jackman is that there was an acclaimed Sydney theatre production of King Lear in the actor’s native Australia in 2015, for which Geoffrey Rush won rave reviews (but then had to deny inappropriate behaviour) and then just last year, again in Jackman’s home city of Sydney, came another, this time starring Robert Menzies. Hugh could have done either of those easily.
