Jackman rocks robotic mullet

Character thinks he’s cool, but really isn’t

Hugh Jackman figures he’s come full circle in a hirsute kind of way.

Jackman sports a mullet in the sci-fi action flick Chappie just as he did two decades ago in his first Australian TV role on the series Corelli.

“My wife (Deborra-Lee Furness) reminded me that I had a mullet when she met me,” he says of the show starring Furness. “So it’s a nice throwback.”

In the cautionary tale from Vancouver director Neil Blomkamp, Chappie is a Johannesburg police droid transformed by a rogue scientist (Dev Patel) into a robot that can think and feel.

The trouble arrives when street hoods kidnap him and turn him into a bank robber.

Jackman is a competing scientist who wants to eliminate Chappie permanently.

He’s an Aussie scoundrel with a bad haircut, a penchant for wearing shorts and a need to be liked.

“I love the idea of people sort of being themselves in films.” says Blomkamp. “That’s where the idea of Hugh’s character being Australian came from, as well as letting him choose clothes and hair.”

Says Jackman: “I haven’t worn those khaki shorts since high school. And I’m very proud of the mullet. Watch, on Halloween this year, mullets will be back.”

The Australian slang his character uses was more difficult to reference. The Sydney native even had to do some research.

“I had to Google Australian slang,” Jackman admits. “And a lot of the ones that come up in the film, like ‘a frog in a sock’ and ‘smart as a dunny rat,’ I had never heard before.”

Still, he embraces his bad guy with a sly wink. “He’s one of those guys who thinks he’s the coolest, and that everyone at the office likes him, and that he’s got it all together — which he doesn’t.”

He says he appreciates the serious themes in the film, which investigates the pros and cons of creating artificial intelligence.

“One of the many great things about working with (Blomkamp) is that he’s deeply involved in the philosophical heart of this movie,” Jackman says. “Not only is the movie about robots becoming sentient, it is also about the very nature of consciousness.”

The actor can only speculate on the potential for Wolverine entering other comic book universes.

“But it is a fun Friday night discussion of, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see Batman fight Wolverine?’”

And the verdict? “Wolverine would just shred him.”