Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness: Is Hugh's ‘good man' image in tatters?

7NEWS

a day ago

Hugh Jackman is meant to be one of the good ones.
That's his whole thing. He's a husband man. He's a music man. He's a good man.
In the third ever episode of The West Wing, press secretary C.J. Cregg, in a moment of frustration, said, 'I don't care what it is, I care what it looks like'. That's her job.
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The façade of celebrity enabled by a publicity machine means no one ever really knows when it comes to famous people, only what it looks like. Timothee Chalamet looks like he's fun, Gwyneth Paltrow looks like she's a woo-woo queen, Tom Hanks looks like a top bloke.
If you Google 'celebrities with good reputations', Jackman is right up top. What it looks like is more potent than what it is.
That's why Jackman's soon-to-be ex-wife Deborra-Lee Furness's statement this week, after she officially filed for divorce, has the potential to damage his career.
'My heart and compassion goes out to anyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal. It is a profound wound that cuts deep,' she said.
Furness never used the words infidelity or cheating, and betrayal can encompass many things, but the implication is clear.
Every woman has either been cheated on or knows another woman who has felt the sting of deception from the person they trusted the most. It's a sensitive topic, triggering terrible memories of empty nights in an emotional black hole, or of nursing their friend through the darkness.
Women remember.
The same day as Furness's statement, Jackman posted a video of himself doing a skip rope routine scored to NSYNC's Bye, Bye, Bye with the caption 'FINALLY'.
Textually, if you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, the video is clipped from his Hugh Jackman: From New York with Love show at Radio City Hall. It's been running since the start of the year and he has struggled to nail that particular part of the performance, fubbing his moves or losing the beat. So, to finally get through must be exhilarating.
Subtextually? Ooph.
Jackman is a smart guy. He knows what it looks like. And it looks like he's trolling his ex-wife.
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No one knows what happens in someone else's relationship and the factors that go into any marriage breakdown are complex. It's rarely simple, it's rarely one-sided. The only people who know what really happened are Jackman and Furness, and they too will have different versions of the same experience.
But that's what it is, not what it looks like.
Intentionally or not, one of the foundations of Jackman's career is that he's one of the good ones. He embodies romantic ideals – he can flex out as Wolverine and do an impressive amount of bench presses but is just as comfortable singing showtunes, flashing his big smile, having a laugh and going home to his wife.
Jackman's charismatic masculinity is an effortless one, and heterosexual women find that extremely appealing in a world where so many men feel the need to perform a certain type of manhood.
Crucial to his reputation, to the ability of female audiences to impose their fantasies about him on to him, has been his and Furness's love story.
The pair met in 1995 on the set of Correlli, a 10-episode ABC series in which Furness played a prison psychologist and he portrayed an armed robber with whom she becomes romantically involved. They weren't Harley Quinn and the Joker, but the illicitness of the relationship fuelled the heat.
Off-screen, he immediately found himself drawn to her, but it took him weeks before he worked up the nerves to confess his crush.
'I knew very early, I knew before Deb knew. Even when she tried to break up with me, I knew,' he told the Aussies in Hollywood podcast in 2018. 'I'm a very indecisive person, Deb really knows this about me, I can count on my hand the amount of times in my life anything has felt that clear to me, and when it happens it's such a relief.'
He proposed four months later and they were married in April, 1996. In 2000 and 2005, they adopted their two kids, Oscar and Ava.
When they met, Furness was the bigger name. She had been working steadily in the Australian screen industry since she was a kid with roles in The Flying Doctors, Kings and Neighbours and he was fresh out of drama school.
After guest spots in local TV shows including Blue Heelers, Australian films Erskineville Kings and Paperback Hero and roles on stage in Beauty and the Beast, Sunset Boulevard and Oklahoma, he got his big international break when he was cast in X-Men in 2000.
The movie was a huge hit and Jackman's turn as the gruff but upstanding Wolverine/Logan was noticed by everyone. His star was ascendant and his name was circulating among Hollywood casting directors.
He made three movies that were released the following year: action thriller Swordfish, and rom-coms Kate & Leopold and Someone Like You. Opposite Meg Ryan and Ashley Judd, he played the romantic heroes, one an impoverished 19th century duke who time travels to 21st century New York City, and the other, a womanising TV producer who changes his stripes.
While both films are minor works in the rom-com canon, Jackman was beguiling, and persuaded an international audience that he had shades beyond being a mutant superhero.
The rom-com would not end up being one of his favourite spaces to play in. In addition to that pair of 2001 movies, he only made two other pure play rom-coms – Paperback Hero with Claudia Karvan in 1999 and Scoop opposite Scarlett Johansson in 2006.
While most of Jackman's screen work has been in dramas, thrillers, action movies, many of them male-skewering fare including Chappie, The Front Runner, and 10 X-Men movies, he has still played the romantic lead in a slate of films that leveraged the goodwill of female audiences towards him.
These included Australia, The Fountain, Reminiscence, Les Miserables and The Greatest Showman.
The musicals are really interesting because Jackman's talents are so entrenched with his ability to entertain with his singing and dancing, and he has created a whole sub-ecosystem with that aspect of his persona.
The Greatest Showman netted $US459 million off the back of a relatively $US84 million production budget partly because of repeated viewings from superfans. The movie opened in the US on soft numbers but word-of-mouth among fans pushed it to great heights.
Significantly, that opening weekend in the US, 73 per cent of the audience were women.
Depending on the country and the report, statistics for what percentage a live theatre audience is women vary, but the lowest estimate is 65 per cent. When it comes to deciding what show someone is going to splash out big money on, it's women who are calling the shots.
Jackman needs women on his side.
Post-COVID, he has only released two films, Florian Zeller's domestic drama The Son and the Marvel extravaganza Deadpool & Wolverine. He has three movies in post-production, including an action epic in which he plays Robin Hood.
What he's been spending a lot of time doing instead is theatre. He did The Music Man on Broadway from late 2021 to early 2023, and now his Hugh Jackman: From New York with Love shows, which is playing sporadically until October.
He's also currently doing a drama production off-Broadway, Hannah Moscovitch's Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, in which he plays a middle-aged university professor who engages in an affair with one of his students.
The show runs until mid-June and it is all but sold out. For the 400-seat venue, only a handful tickets remain across the shows combined, and they cost between $US297 and $US400. So, at least for this production, Jackman's personal dramas haven't affected sales.
There are still tickets available for his remaining Radio City gigs, skip rope routine and all.
He and Furness were together for 27 years when they separated, which was announced in September 2023, nine months after The Music Man ended its run.
Within two months, rumours flew that he and his The Music Man co-star, Sutton Foster, had an affair during the production, and that was the reason for his marriage break-up. In October 2024, Foster filed for divorce from husband Ted Griffin.
Jackman and Foster were first photographed holding hands in public in early January 2025, and by the end of the month, she was at the opening night of Hugh Jackman: From New York with Love.
Whether Jackman will take a direct financial hit to his career remains to be seen. Stanley Tucci cheated on his first wife, Kathryn Spath, with co-star Edie Falco before going back to Spath, but we still love him.
Ewan McGregor bounced back after allegations of a crossover between his split from first wife Eve Mavrakis and the start of his relationship with Fargo co-star Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
Brad Pitt is still riding high after the controversial, allegedly violent way his marriage to Angelina Jolie ended, a relationship that started with his infidelity to then-wife Jennifer Aniston.
There's a study from a US company called the National Research Group that surveys 3000 audiences about actors that they would go to a cinema to see in a movie, and Pitt came in fourth in 2024. Jackman didn't make the top 25 but his Deadpool & Wolverine co-star Ryan Reynolds was fifth.
Jackman and Pitt's stardom are hinged on different things. Pitt's 'heartthrob' status works differently to Jackman's. Since he's been in the public eye, Pitt has been attached to a bunch of women including Christina Applegate, Juliette Lewis, Gwyneth Paltrow as well as Aniston and Jolie.
Jackman was always a one-woman man, and to a woman who is 13 years older than him. His female fans like that. Foster is only six years younger than Jackman but she's 19 years younger than Furness.
Take a straw poll among the women in your life and ask them if, today, they like Jackman a little less. Don't be surprised at their answers.
Whatever happened between him and Furness is, technically, their personal business. But his reputation as a good man, a wife guy who had posted effusive messages about his missus, is a business, so, it's not what it is, it's what it looks like.