Raw emotion
Actor Hugh Jackman chased hard to play Peter Miller in this rip-out-your-heart role, writes Garry Maddox.
Y‘The script is so beautiful. It so smartly talks about this issue of mental health, without giving answers, without giving easy fixes, and just really understanding what it’s like for a family going through these issues.’ HUGH JACKMAN
ou don’t think of Hugh Jackman going hard after a role – chasing down the director to say how keen he is – but that’s exactly what one of Australia’s biggest Hollywood stars did for The Son.
The rip-out-your-heart drama is French writer-director Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father, his intense 2020 film that featured Anthony Hopkins as an elderly man with dementia. It won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and best actor.
‘‘It’s a really good ploy when an agent says, ‘there’s an amazing role, but there’s a couple of other actors in talks for it’,’’ Jackman says drolly. ‘‘That really motivates actors.’’
The X-Men, Les Miserables and The Greatest Showman star, who has just finished a triumphant run starring in The Music Man on Broadway, knew Zeller had written The Son as a play – part of a trilogy that includes The Father and The Mother – about mental illness or disorders.
‘‘I read it that afternoon, fell in love with it and felt an urgency to play it immediately,’’ Jackman says. ‘‘So I sent him an email. I just said, ‘Listen, if you’re dancing with someone else, I’m not the kind of guy to cut in. But if you’re not, I’d love to play the part’.
‘‘We Zoomed the next day and he offered me the part, which was a huge relief to me.’’
The role that so interested Jackman was playing a New York lawyer, Peter Miller, who has such a promising life with partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and their new baby that he is considering a job working on a political campaign in Washington. Then former wife Kate (Laura Dern) arrives distraught and scared that their 17-year-old son Nicholas (Australian Zen McGrath) has been skipping school for a month and having dark thoughts.
Feeling abandoned, friendless and worried about his sanity, Nicholas wants to live with his father.
But when Peter agrees Nicholas can move in, starting at a new school and seeing a therapist, the boy slides deeper into crisis. ‘‘I don’t know what’s happening to me,’’ he says through tears.
Zeller, a successful playwright turned film-maker, was surprised and touched by Jackman’s humility and honesty when he wrote to him. ‘‘I felt very strongly that he would be extraordinary in this part,’’ he says. ‘‘He was already so connected with the emotions that I wanted to explore.’’
Jackman, who also came on as executive producer to add his Hollywood clout to the production, saw The Son as a film that could start vital conversations about depression, anxiety and suicide.
‘‘The script is so beautiful,’’ he says. ‘‘It so smartly talks about this issue of mental health, without giving answers, without giving easy fixes, and just really understanding what it’s like for a family going through these issues.
‘‘There’s not a person reading this who doesn’t know someone very close to them going through something like this. It’s so prevalent, it’s such an epidemic.
‘‘It’s certainly something that I know. And I just felt this was a role that I rarely get offered and a level of writing and intelligence that was so incisive and beautiful and the kind of conversation we need to have as a society.’’
In one of the film’s most vivid scenes, Peter visits his political careerist father (Hopkins, returning from The Father before dementia). Over lunch, it becomes clear that this distant, abrasive figure is still affecting Peter’s ability to be a good parent.
Jackman calls it intergenerational trauma. ‘‘We’re a bridge between the way we’re brought up and the way we parent,’’ he says. ‘‘If you have children, and even if not, the way you interact with the world and the relationships you have, there’s a lot we inherit without knowing it.
‘‘When I became a parent, there was a long list of things that I would definitely do differently – ‘I’m not going to do that’, ‘I’m not going to do this’. Then it’s amazing how often things come out of your mouth and you go, ‘Oh, I’m looking at that like my father’. In some ways, that trauma can be like a wildfire that goes down between generations.’’
Jackman, who also had to deal with his own father’s death late in the shoot in September 2021, says the film has changed him.
‘‘I’m a different parent, a different person, for making the film,’’ he says. ‘‘I certainly lead with more vulnerability with my kids. Prior to the film I was a little more feeling, I guess, that what kids mostly wanted was stability and strength. The idea that their parents have got the answers, they know where they’re going.
‘‘And what I realised, particularly with a 22- and a 17-year-old, is it’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I’m not a 100% sure what to do here. Can we talk about it?’ And they seem to appreciate that.’’
Jackman’s raw performance had him nominated for a Golden Globe and, after Venice, he was considered an early chance of an
Oscar nomination. He is ‘‘super proud’’ of the film and keen to praise McGrath, a now 20-yearold who had shot not much more than the little-known American miniseries Dig, an episode of the ABC comedy Utopia and the film Red Dog: True Blue before The Son. He submitted a filmed audition to win a demanding first major film role.
‘‘He was there with his dad, Craig, who flew over from Melbourne,’’ Jackman says. ‘‘I just thought he did an amazing job because a lot of the scenes he had were incredibly emotional and really, really difficult. Almost all of them, pretty much.’’
So will audiences find watching The Son uncomfortable, given the rawness of the emotion and the difficult subject matter?
‘‘When I was growing up, I remember very clearly The Deer Hunter,’’ Jackman says. ‘‘I remember Kramer vs. Kramer. I was a teenager, but I remember these movies – they opened my eyes and opened my heart.
‘‘It was like I was thirsty for that kind of really sometimes harsh, sometimes uncomfortable look at what really goes on in the human experience. And I can tell you from my children watching the movie with me, one thing I’m really proud of that generation is they’re not scared of these conversations. They’re not nearly as uncomfortable as our generation with this kind of thing.’’ –