(This feature was originally published in the September 2006 issue of Premiere.)

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in The Fountain.

At some point between appetizers and dinner, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson got to singing show tunes. They were with friends, including Harvey Weinstein, at the Ivy in London, after a long day on the set of The Prestige, writer-director Christopher Nolan's new drama about rival magicians in Victorian England. He plays a flashy magician; she's his assistant and love interest. (Christian Bale—who starred in Batman Begins for Nolan—is his more somber nemesis.) Jackman and Johansson started on Oklahoma!, then moved on to Guys and Dolls and Carousel. She taught him a few numbers from Damn Yankees. He sang selections from The Boy From Oz, the musical about Peter Allen for which he'd won a Tony on Broadway (and which he is currently reprising on an Australian tour). “I'm a show tunes-loving kind of girl, and Hugh has a beautiful voice,” Johansson says. “He has this boyish infectiousness. Harvey told me later that we sang for two hours.” She does a growly Weinstein imitation: “ 'Scarlett, you were singing so much, we never got dessert.' ” It's official: At 37, Hugh Jackman is having his life-of-the-party moment. He's long seemed biologically destined to be a star. Six three, with hair as thick as fudge, he has sleek features and a physique to make a sculptor swoon. Workwise, he can do anything. “I was floored by him in The Boy From Oz,” says writer-director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream). “He exploded on the stage. Hugh Jackman and his talent—there are no boundaries to it. There aren't many guys in history who could sing, dance, act, and are beautiful to look at, but he's definitely one of them.” Jackman's made a name for himself sporting adamantium claws and killer sideburns as Wolverine in three X-Men films and as the monster-slaying title character in 2004's Van Helsing. But in dramas and romantic comedies, he has held back, taken supporting roles—to Ashley Judd in Someone Like You, Meg Ryan in Kate & Leopold, and John Travolta in Swordfish.

This fall, the modest actor finally seems to be mutating into leading-manhood. “A couple years back, when X2 came out, my agent said, 'Okay, now's the time to make your list of directors, and I'm going to ring every one of them,' ” Jackman says, in a sharp Aussie accent that's sexier than the American and British voices he's done onscreen. The directors called back: Woody Allen cast him as a devilish aristocrat opposite Johansson's cub reporter in Scoop. Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins) signed him on as The Prestige's flamboyant illusionist, again opposite Johansson. “The part fits Hugh like a glove,” Nolan says. “He's not only a great movie actor, but also a wonderful stage performer, and his character has to be both. He gets to show a side of himself that the public hasn't seen on film before.”

And Aronofsky gave Jackman his most challenging role to date, as a man who fights for the life of his lover through three different time periods—16th-century Spain, the modern day, and the 26th century—in the heady, multilayered drama The Fountain. The making of that film had its own Hollywood ending. Aronofsky began working on it after Requiem; five years ago, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett signed on. But Pitt dropped out in 2002 and the financing crumbled without him, and Aronofsky spent fruitless months trying to get the story out of his head. Eventually he rewrote it to fit a $35 million budget, and was shopping for a lead actor when a friend dragged him to see Jackman on Broadway. (Even more fortuitously for Aronofsky, he replaced Blanchett with his girlfriend Rachel Weisz; the night he showed her the finished film, she went into labor with their baby.)

Jackman's momentum shows no sign of waning. He's lent his voice to two animated features, Flushed Away and Happy Feet. He'll play a cattle driver opposite Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann's as-yet-untitled Australian epic (he replaced Russell Crowe on that one). And this fall he'll be in New York shooting a thriller, The Tourist, in which he's the villain. It will be the first film made by Jackman's production company, called Seed Productions, which also has a Wolverine prequel in the works.

In June, just after finishing a press tour of Asia for X-Men: The Last Stand, and two days before he attended Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's wedding, Jackman was back in Australia with his wife of ten years, Deborra-Lee Furness, an actress, a director, and a partner in Seed. He did this phone interview sitting in his study in a rented house in Sydney, watching rain clouds blow over Tamerama Beach. Their 11-month-old daughter, Ava, was napping; their six-year-old son, Oscar, was heard asking his dad, “What on earth are you up to?” Happily for Jackman, it's a long answer.

Premiere: In the most futuristic scenes in The Fountain, you're floating in a biosphere bubble in deep space, talking to a tree, and your head is completely shaved. What was that like?
I used to be called Pea Head at school. The moment I saw myself, I started laughing hysterically. All I could see were my mates going, “Pea Head! Pea Head!” I'd always dreamed of shaving it, because I love swimming, and with my head shaved, it was the most exquisite feeling.

No pangs of vanity?
Never. I like experimenting. I also had to shave my legs, chest, and arms. After the first couple of days, it became a real pain: wrists, underarms, everything.

But we hardly see your skin.
I know, but we weren't sure when we might, so I had to be ready.

How did your son like you bald?
He was pretty freaked out. I told him beforehand, “If you want, you can cut your hair off with me.” He thought that was a great idea—until he saw me. Now he's obsessed with growing his hair long and never having it cut.

And shaving your head was minor compared with other things you did in that film—I think you played every possible emotion.
I haven't before, and I doubt I'll ever again, have an opportunity to do so many different things in one movie. Just to give you an example of Darren's commitment, the whole year I was on Broadway, we would meet once or twice a week. He would come with me to do research, he would send me books, I was doing tai chi, yoga. I had to do the lotus position in a scene; it took me about 14 months to get there.

What part of the research interested you most?
I watched surgeons remove a brain tumor from a woman. They told me she was going to die anyway, they were just trying to extend her life. What I didn't realize is they'd have her awake. They had her doing these video games the whole time, so they could make choices as to when to stop cutting out the tumor. The moment I met her—she had blond hair just like my wife—my blood literally went cold. All I could think of was my wife on that table. As much as I'd read the script and theorized and practiced philosophy, I knew in that moment that I was so not ready for death. It was probably the most scared I'd ever been. I remember going all cold. I couldn't look at her for a while. Then they started operating, and I cut my vision to just the brain so it became more clinical. But it certainly moved me, made me appreciate what I have in my life so much more.

What was the hardest scene to film?
The scene in space where my character finally admits, “I'm scared.” I had to break down. We started first thing in the morning, and right up till lunchtime, I was just crying. Darren would stop shooting, and I couldn't stop crying. It was late in the film; I was already exhausted, almost broken. When he called, “Lunch,” I thought, “Thank God.” I didn't even know if I could walk to my trailer. I literally lay down on the floor, couldn't eat. At the end of lunch, Darren said, “Okay, mate, we're picking up where we left off.” I almost threw up. [laughs] The first take after lunch is the one that's in the movie. What Darren wanted was, here is a conquistador, a guy who will fight and fight no matter what the odds, and here's the one point he admits, “I don't know if I can do it.” Darren needed to see in my face that utter exhaustion. Well, there was no acting required. There are moments in this movie that I'm uncomfortable watching myself.

Why?
I felt emotionally as naked as I ever have been, and it happens to be on film. But I've got to tell you, I loved it. I couldn't have done any more, I don't think. And Darren was there every step of the way—not at a monitor, right by the camera.

He doesn't watch through a monitor?
Well, he does in terms of setting up the camera. God, talk about finicky. Every shot is a piece of art. He's obsessed with symmetry. I think a couple of times Matthew Libatique, the DP, wanted to head-butt Darren. We were shooting one scene in a doctor's office, and Darren kept saying, “It's wrong, it's wrong.” It turned out that one of the X-ray screens was 1.5 percent off being level. No one else could see it. But Darren would not have been able to look at that in dailies, let alone in the movie. He would have dropped the shot. So he would watch things in the monitor, but when it came to the meat of the story, he was always right there.

Was that awkward during your love scenes with his girlfriend?
When Rachel and I were making out in the bath, she was naked, and Darren was sitting on an apple box next to the camera, four feet away from us. The scene as written just said we kiss, she pulls me into the bath, and it's clear we're about to make love. So she pulls me in, and we're kissing, kissing, Darren's right there, we're kissing, kissing. Eventually Rachel took off my shirt, we're kissing some more, I'm on top of her. Finally I hear Darren going, “Take his pants off!” [laughs] So no, it was never a worry for me. Darren was at pains to make me know that the film would come first; he would never make me feel like the third wheel, and I never did.

The movie is so romantic, it's almost like he wrote it to call her to him.
To me, it's a love story. She looks so beautiful in that film. I think she's extraordinary, so fantastic and vulnerable. And how she conveys that sense of accepting her death. That's a very difficult thing to play. None of us have really had to face it. It's so affecting. It goes back to that original quote in the movie about Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden because they ate from the tree of knowledge, and God hiding the tree of life. The tree of knowledge is also known as the tree of good and evil. Basically, duality. So the moment Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge, or good and evil, humans started to experience life as we all experience it now, which is life and death, poor and wealthy, pain and pleasure, good and evil. We live in a world of duality. Husband, wife, we relate everything. And much of our lives are spent not wanting to die, be poor, experience pain. It's what the movie's about.