Hugh Jackman on His Brutal New ‘Robin Hood,’ and Why He’s Suddenly Dying in All His Movies

Few Hollywood stars working today have as varied a skill set as Hugh Jackman. The song-and-dance man can carry a Broadway musical (“Oklahoma,” “The Music Man”), host the Oscars, carry an ebullient romantic movie musical (“The Greatest Showman,” “Song Sung Blue”) and embody Marvel action hero Wolverine over decades, from origin start (“X-Men”) to abysmal end (“Logan”) — and then bring him back to life (“Deadpool & Wolverine”).

And Jackman can get away with starring in brutal indie actioners like revisionist myth “The Death of Robin Hood,” yet another movie that kills him off, along with summer sleeper “The Sheep Detectives,” which murders him in the first 15 minutes.

“I’ve done three films in six months that have come out where I die,” he told me at the Whitby Hotel in New York, “so I’m not sure what that’s saying. I don’t want to die; I just want to do it fictitiously, if that’s OK.”

“The Death of Robin Hood” came to him when producer Aaron Ryder sent him Michael Sarnoski’s script. He liked it, then checked out the director’s first feature, “Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage. “I was 10 minutes into watching ‘Pig,’ and from the opening frame, you can feel his voice, how confident it is,” said Jackman. “He’s only 30!”

Nonetheless, Jackman jumped onto this nihilistic, brutal, and grim movie to help get it financed and produced. He suffered hours of prosthetic makeup to turn a decade older. He suffered muddy chills while shooting outdoors in Northern Ireland. And he was happy doing it.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and brevity.

Anne Thompson: I loved this movie. It’s dark and grim and brutal and disgusting. Is it your “Unforgiven”?

Hugh Jackman: That film was right at the forefront for me, for sure. There was something beautiful and meditative about [“The Death of Robin Hood”], and this relationship with this woman [Jodie Comer], and the meeting of their minds, or spirits. There was something beautifully redemptive and cautionary about it. I love this idea of a mythic hero, a cultural hero.

Hugh Jackman at the Whitby HotelAnne Thompson

The movie is about the end of Robin Hood’s life. How much do you know about the historic figure?

I read a bunch of books about it. If you wanted to believe he was real, you could find evidence for that. There are records of people through the centuries, since the 1100s. And it changed: Up until the 1500s, he was just an outlaw, a horrible person, a cautionary tale. Then, as things started to change politically in England, there was the beginning of that feeling of an uprising by the serfs against the aristocracy and the landowners, and this cultural hero rocking the boat and stealing from the rich to give to the poor started to be birthed. Even at the beginning, if you watch him, he was a bad guy with some honorable traits; he had some rules, like, ‘Do not harm women,’ so his outlaws would never touch a woman, or he would give someone a second chance if they were lying to him, so that he gradually became the hero. These myths arise for a purpose, for a need that already exists.

‘The Death of Robin Hood’A24

What is the message of the movie?

Be careful of the stories you buy into. We get stories on all sorts of levels, from the day we’re born. We get them from media, we get them from our parents, we get them from religion, from all over the place. Do they feel right for you? Because those stories have been used to do a lot of violent damage in history. What if that story or legend of him was actually his own creation to make people do terrible things, to follow him? Oh, what if it was all a lie? What if maybe there was a couple of rich people he stole from, but what if he never gave it to the poor? What if he was just a brutal murderer? Now, even at the end of the movie, we’re not entirely sure.

This was not an easy shoot.

In Northern Ireland, based out of Belfast, on an island, almost everything was on location, but spectacular. That first scene in the mud, that fight scene…I was totally up for it, but I’ve never been so internally grumpy as I was that night. I was not far off: “I’m done for the day.” It was a night shoot, and I was so exhausted. I still have mud in places that you don’t want to know about. There was one point before I get on top of this Australian actor to actually kill him, where I was so tired that I just had to rest, and I was laying on him. When you fight to the death, and you’ve got fingers in eyeballs, and you’re fighting, there’s this weird proximity intimacy; I just lay there to rest. I thought there was something cool about that moment.

What did Sarnoski bring out of you?

I’ve been really lucky. I’ve worked with some great directors, and he gives me that same feeling as Aronofsky, Nolan, Villeneuve, Luhrmann: They have something. There’s a confidence in their voice. They have something to say. What Michael brought out of me was an ease, and in my play, being less controlled. I trusted him. He shaped and crafted my performance.

Are you somebody who can get pretty much anything you want made? Was this easy to move forward as an action film with recognizable IP, and you on board?

I hope I can. I hope I helped it, but I don’t know what the horse race is. There’ll be other actors who’d get it done quicker, or may have gotten a bigger budget. We got it across the line. But we wanted to shoot on film and shoot on an island; that made it more expensive, and it’s probably not as big a budget as you think, and that’s all OK.

Did your attitude start to shift with “The Greatest Showman,” where you took a flyer on something that not everybody would have bet on, and it went better than OK?

I’m blessed that I can be in the position of doing things I really, really want to do. It actually did great, for the second-worst opening in history. The behind-the-scenes story of “Logan” was that there was a lot of resistance to that version, understandably: We were playing with established IP, and it wasn’t called “Wolverine,” and it was R-rated: “Why are you doing this?” “You know what, let’s go for it. Let’s just take the swing and go with our gut.” And so those two things exceeded everyone’s expectations, and that has given me a confidence.

Hugh Jackman and Michael Sarnoski at ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ premiereJason Lowrie/BFA.com

“Song Sung Blue,” too. Hardly a normal everyday musical drama.

But that was another one, I felt, “I gotta do this!” It was a crowdpleaser. And I just read a script — “oh, I had that feeling again” — and it’s “Treasure Island,” playing Long John Silver. I’ve never read “Treasure Island,” never seen it. So, I’m the only person on planet who has no idea what it’s about, but I read this script by Jack Thorne [the showrunner on “Adolescence”]: “I’m absolutely doing this.”

Talk about your wild, long Robin Hood hair and makeup from Pam Westmore and Sean Flanigan.

Pam’s great-grandfather [George Westmore] was the first ever makeup artist in movie history. Actors, because they all came from the theater, they all did their own. Then, he came in to do some famous silent movie actress, and she became iconic. From that moment on, Westmore did Douglas Fairbanks in 1922 as Robin Hood, and then her grandfather, his son, did Errol Flynn. And now the granddaughter does my hair. We were in the makeup trailer, playing with ideas. So, you have this long hair and beard, and we went, “Oh my god, this is it.”

You’re willing to do something dark and not necessarily crowd-pleasing. You’re willing to challenge the audience.

I watch this movie, and it feels beautiful to me in a human way. It makes me relish the complexity of life and of being human.

Do you have any pet projects you want to get made but haven’t been able to so far?

One thing I tried to get made, I couldn’t get made. “The Overstory,” Richard Powers’ book. It’s beautiful, won the Pulitzer Prize. It was about trees.

Do the Tonys make you long to go back to Broadway?

I was literally off Broadway, having a night off that night. I just finished the play last night. I started a theater company. I’m totally doing the things I want. It’s called “Together,” and we’ve been down at the Audible Minetta Lane Theatre. This is our second season. We just did three months, and I was in two plays, and we did new writing, where half the tickets are 35 bucks, so we’re making it accessible, and trying to do low-fi, there’s not a lot of set, not a lot of sound, there’s no microphones, and just do new works.

Which is the hardest thing to get up now. You’re doing a big service there.

I’m serving myself, because I love acting, and I want to do great work and great material, and I want to push myself, and those pieces, they’re not all crowd pleasers. They’re thoughtful, thought-provoking.

“The Death of Robin Hood” opens in theaters on Friday, June 19 from A24.