Jackman hero turns dark

Hugh Jackman missed out on an Oscar for his captivating performance as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, but since then it's almost as if not a day has gone by when the Golden Globe and Tony award-winner hasn't picked up some new accolade.

When I met him at the Zurich Film Festival late last month, he was both promoting his gripping new thriller, Prisoners, and collecting the event's Golden Icon award, his second lifetime achievement honour in two days.

"I really feel for my family," quipped the X-Men star at a press conference in Zurich's fancy Baur au Lac Hotel. "I go home tomorrow morning and if they haven't got an award for me, I'm walking out the door."

Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve set out to direct Prisoners - his first English-language movie - and told his producer that he didn't want any "narcissistic mad idiots" on his set.

"I said, 'I want real artists. It's tough to make a movie. I don't want any crazies'," he said.

They needed to cast an actor in the lead role who was approved by the studio and Jackman had been attached to the project when it fell apart under a different director. However, it wasn't simple convenience that worked in his favour. Villeneuve had been impressed by the actor's work in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, and thought he was "fantastic" in a play in New York, and he knew that there were depths to the Australian that hadn't been explored before on screen.

"He's an actor that has a lot of skills and is very powerful," Villeneuve says, "but who is trapped, in some ways, in an image of Mr Nice Guy and of a superhero, and he wants to get out of this image."

Jackman concedes that he was starting to feel a "little bit" boxed in. Outside America and New York the variety of his work was being somewhat obscured by his appearances as Wolverine (the next X-Men film, Days of Future Past, will be his seventh screen outing as the adamantium-clawed mutant).

"I don't feel boxed in because I know what I am capable of," he says. "But I was saying to Denis that I am aware that there is a bit of a danger around the world that people actually think, 'Oh, that's all he can do', and I was starting to see it reflected in the kind of things I was getting offered."

He isn't complaining or spitting on his luck, though. If Wolverine were all he was ever allowed to do, Jackman would still be happy, he insists. "I expect nothing and I am pretty much surprised by everything that has happened in my career."

When he started acting, his biggest ambition was just to be able to pay the rent. Now, "I am too rich," says the 45-year-old son of "£10 Poms".

"My parents are very non- materialistic and I am too, and my friends who are materialistic say, 'You don't deserve it. You don't appreciate it. Why do they give you free clothes? You don't even care about it'."

What he does care about are his wife, the actress Deborra-Lee Furness, children Ava and Oscar, and his craft.

Prisoners gave him a chance to take on a role that will surprise many of his fans. At its core, the film is an allegory about America's response to 9/11 and how the country's struggle with monsters - real and assumed - unleashed the monstrous in itself.

This is embodied in Jackman's Keller Dover, a religious survivalist who reacts to the abduction of his daughter in a way that forces him to confront the darkness inside himself. The actor was intrigued by the character's moral ambiguity, but it worried other people, Villeneuve reveals.

"When we were talking about the screenplay with the distributor and the producer, everybody was saying to me, 'It's a strong and powerful story but we don't like the main character. It's a very big problem. And we know that you're casting Hugh Jackman, and everybody loves Hugh, but will the audience love the character?'

"I said, 'No one will love him. It's not possible. But you can follow him and you can understand his inner moral conflict'."

Jackman had to fall in love with Dover in order not to judge him. Emotionally, the character was his toughest challenge to date. While filming one particularly harrowing scene, he became so enraged that he stunned the director and crew into silence by smashing a real hammer into a wall, just inches away from the head of fellow actor Paul Dano (Denis used the take in the film). No one knew he was going to do it, including Jackman himself.

"I had gone into a weird place and it shocked the hell out of me," he says.

"And what shocked me most was how close to his head I was. Now I watch that scene and I can't believe how Paul Dano did not flinch. He just really quietly faints."

Jackman could well be in the running for another Oscar nomination, while Villeneuve is convinced that his performance will help alter the way people view him. But whatever happens down the line, the only thing on Jackman's mind right now is the three-month break he is about to take off after making four demanding films back to back.

"It is unusual for me to do so many films in a row but every one of them, particularly this film, felt compelling to me," he explains. "I begged my wife and my kids to let me do them, and they were understanding to a certain degree, but it's time for me to go home now."

At least until February, that is, when he will fly to Johannesburg to film Elysium director Neill Blomkamp's new movie, Chappie. In the meantime, expect him to be a player during the awards season.