Hugh Jackman

September 19, 2013Norman Wilner

PRISONERS directed by Denis Villeneuve, written by Aaron Guzikowski, with Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard and Paul Dano. A Warner Bros. release. 153 minutes. Opens Friday (September 20). For venues and times, see listings.

Hugh Jackman sits down with me a few hours before he’s due to walk the red carpet at the Toronto Film Festival for Prisoners. Denis Villeneuve’s film is grim and intense, but Jackman is smiling and upbeat. In fairness, he always is. It’s just his nature.

Prisoners casts Jackman – fresh off his first Oscar nomination, for Les Misérables – as Keller Dover, a desperate father who’ll do anything to get his abducted daughter back, including grabbing the prime suspect (Paul Dano) and torturing him in hopes of learning something the police couldn’t.

The movie, which placed third in the running for this year’s TIFF People’s Choice Award, has a few problems, but Jackman isn’t one of them he gives a hell of a performance as a man of faith willing to become a monster if it saves his child. Oscar talk is inevitable for this kind of role, but I don’t think that’s why Jackman took the part. I think he saw something in the character of the raging Keller that he wanted to explore in himself.

“I believe our relationship to violence,” he says, “is our complete reluctance to look at it within ourselves. It’s always an Other. I think it’s so easy to go [sighs], ‘Oh, the Middle East,’ you know? But this is in all of us, these primal urges.”

The role of Dover was an interesting choice. The character’s entire identity is built on his notion of himself as an alpha male protector – not unlike the ultra-capable Logan, whom he’s played in half a dozen X-Men projects, most recently this summer’s well-received solo venture, The Wolverine. But Logan is a fearless superhero, and Keller Dover… well, he’s neither of those things.

“To me, the title Prisoners [means] not so much that we’re all prisoners of the situation, but we are prisoners to those fears, elemental fears,” he says. “And everything we do in life stems from that. In this situation it’s like you’re inside the jar. You get to see the morass of what their fear is, because it plays out. And you watch people unravel.”

Keller’s unravelling is the sort of performance that may shock Jackman’s diehard fans, who know him – from his jaunty Twitter account and his willingness to send himself up at any and every opportunity – as a singularly cheerful and decent person.

“I think in life and in acting I wanna experience the real stuff,” he says. “I mean, all of us act, but the authenticity that something like this provides? It’s a chance to actually bare your soul. And I love that on stage, too, when you can actually just go” – he pauses to exhale – “‘Here it is.’

“That’s what it’s all about, that connection,” says the Tony Award winner. “It’s amazing how you can feel this kind of elation and connectiveness with complete strangers. It can happen in a film situation it can happen on stage.”