The two greatest actors in cinema history, according to Hugh Jackman: “The best I’ve ever seen”
It’s going to be interesting to see how the next few movies starring Hugh Jackman do at the box office. There’s no doubt that he has the pulling power to make a film a success, but his next projects are either quite niche or have been done in other ways so many times that they risk falling by the wayside.
Jackman had a pretty quiet 2025 by all accounts; he didn’t have any new films released, although he has finished the year off doing a 12-show residency in New York, where he’s performing all kinds of musical hits from his movies like The Greatest Showman and Les Misérables.
The singing, in fact, has taken up most of his time over the past few years, with Jackman doing international one-man tours, and a look at the last five years shows he is remarkably choosy with the films he makes, with just last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, 2022’s The Son and a thriller called Reminiscence that ironically nobody remembers standing as his only films in the 2020s.
But then Jackman has pretty much done it all over the past two decades, from Marvel movies to tense dramas to cartoon voiceovers, in addition to all his work on the stage. He’s picked up an Emmy Award, a Grammy and two Tony’s thanks to his Broadway performance, leaving him just an Oscar away from joining just 21 people in history to complete the set, and he has had a nomination already back in 2014 for Les Mis.
Jackman has shown on several occasions that there’s a powerful acting talent behind the showtunes, especially in films like 2013’s Prisoners, directed by Denis Villeneuve, and he appears, in terms of what he says to the press anyway, to be much more interested in what he can bring to performances than the fame that comes with it all.
He told Forbes about the actors that went before him that he looks up to, and in choosing Paul Newman, said, “No one had more movie star mega-wattage, but if you look at the parts he played, they were just great character pieces.”
Another legendary actor he picked out was classic movie tough guy Burt Lancaster, star of The Killers and From Here to Eternity, with Jackman adding, “For me, he was always surprising, bold in his choices. Some of his drunk acting was the best I’ve ever seen.”
Lancaster was a four-time Academy Award nominee, winning one, and is regularly listed as one of the finest male actors in cinema history, while Newman also won an Oscar and was nominated for one in five different decades.
Jackman’s next two major roles are firstly in the Neil Diamond-inspired Song Sung Blue, which is out right at the start of 2026 and co-stars Kate Hudson as a pair of Diamond tribute singers journeying across America. He’ll follow that up with yet another Robin Hood film, this time one called The Death of Robin Hood.
Now, while the well of inspiration provided Nottingham’s favourite resident is surely close to drying up by now, this one does at least feature a high-quality cast; alongside Jackman will be Bill Skarsgard and always-ace Jodie Comer, so that bodes well, and it’s directed by Michael Sarnoski, who did Pig starring Nicolas Cage, which is another tick in a box.
Jackman also plays the lead role in the upcoming live-action comedy The Sheep Detectives alongside Emma Thompson, playing a shepherd who reads his flock murder mysteries and then gets found dead, leading his sheep to try to work out who did it. No, that isn’t a joke.
