Latest news with #SexualMisconduct
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Hugh Jackman seen SMILING in public after ex Deborra-Lee Furness' shock divorce statement
Hugh Jackman has been spotted in public for the first time since his ex Deborra-Lee Furness filed for divorce, and he didn't seem bothered as he brushed off the drama. The 56-year-old actor exited his off-Broadway play 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes' around 5pm on Friday to greet fans who stood outside New York City 's Minetta Lane Theatre eager to catch a glimpse of him. witnessed the actor in high spirits and was all smiles as he signed his autograph, took photos with adoring fans and even gave some a hug. The Deadpool and Wolverine star, who changed into comfy shorts and a T-shirt, didn't seem bothered by his divorce playing out in the news as he was focused on making the fans happy since they had waited outside over half an hour since the play had ended. He told the crowd, 'Thanks for waiting,' and made sure to thank them for coming, even asking some fans how they were doing. As he made his way to a nearby Citi bike rack, fans continued to approach him and he made sure to give each and every one attention. A few minutes after socializing with fans, he hopped on his Citi bike and rode away. Before Hugh exited the theater, his costar Ella Beatty - Warren Beatty and Annette Bening's 25-year-old daughter - left the theater separately and also took the time to greet fans and sign autographs. When asked about working alongside Hugh, who she has steamy kisses with onstage, she told 'I love Hugh. He's the most wonderful person.' She refused, however, to comment on how he's holding up amid his ex's divorce filing. Instead of responding, she kept quiet and continued to greet fans. revealed earlier this week that the 69-year-old Australian producer had filed a petition for divorce in New York on May 23, nearly two years after they announced their separation. In fact, everything between the couple had been ironed out behind the scenes since multiple court documents on behalf of Furness' attorney were also filed, including the settlement, a proposed judgment of divorce, and certificate of dissolution. All that needs to be done now is for the judge to sign off on the judgment. Furness shocked fans by releasing a statement using the word 'betrayal' when speaking about her 'traumatic journey.' In a statement sent to Deborra-Lee said, 'My heart and compassion goes out to everyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal. It's a profound wound that cuts deep, however I believe in a higher power and that God/the universe, whatever you relate to as your guidance, is always working FOR us.' She continued, 'This belief has helped me navigate the breakdown of an almost three-decade marriage. I have gained much knowledge and wisdom through this experience. Even when we are presented with apparent adversity, it is leading us to our greatest good, our true purpose. 'It can hurt, but in the long run, returning to yourself and living within your own integrity, values and boundaries is liberation and freedom.' She concluded her statement with the 'one thing' that she has learned, which is 'that none of this is personal,' adding, 'We are all on our individual journeys and I believe that the relationships in our lives are not random. 'We are drawn to people, we invite them in, in order to learn our lessons and to recognize and heal the broken parts of ourselves...I remain grateful.' After Furness' shock statement, a source had revealed exclusively to Jackman's 'bitter reaction' to her statement. Jackman was blindsided by her words, the source spilled, as he believed they had an 'understanding' they would not publicly trash one another after having a 'secret agreement.' 'Hugh was extremely disappointed after reading what his ex had said,' the insider explained. 'There was no stipulation that she could not address this but there was an unwritten understanding that she would not trash him to the press. 'She got around this by not naming him - instead focusing on how she felt.' The couple had been married for 27 years and have two adopted children together - their son Oscar, 24, and a daughter Ava, 19. Furness has received a 'handsome spousal support payment,' according to an insider who spoke to which she is 'pleased with.' 'There was some back and forth regarding this financial agreement but, in the end, she got what she believed she deserved,' the source added. 'Both are coming out of this financially secure.' A separate source said the divorce is 'non contested,' meaning there was not a major disagreement between the couple divorcing. 'They have worked out the details in advance and everything is ironed out in terms of a settlement, alimony and the expenses for the future of their children,' they said. 'They are amicable and they are both fully committed to being the best parents that they can be.' Jackman, who is dating Sutton Foster and was seen walking hand-in-hand with her days before the filing, is 'looking forward to the future and not looking back.'
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Hugh Jackman looks very happy as he steps out to promote his new theatre show after sparking rumours he has moved in with girlfriend Sutton Foster
looked as happy as Larry in New York on Monday as he greeted a throng of waiting fans while entering the Good Morning America studios. The Aussie A-lister, 56, shielded his eyes with a pair of dark shades as the most-watched morning news show in the US rolled out the red carpet for the actor. Hugh looked dapper in a crisp navy suit over a matching navy sweater and finished the look with a pair of white loafers. The Deadpool star appeared as a guest to promote his one-man live show at Radio City and his new off-Broadway play 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes'. Hugh appeared relaxed and very much in his element entering the iconic Manhattan studios—security guards in tow - waving at fans, signing autographs and posing for the press pack. It comes days after he was spotted with new girlfriend Sutton Foster, 50, carrying moving boxes into his swanky penthouse apartment in Chelsea. The Aussie A-lister, 56, shielded his eyes with a pair of dark shades as the most-watched morning news show in the US rolled out the red carpet for the actor Sutton was seen leaving Hugh's luxe digs before jetting off on a convenient Citi Bike. Moments later, Hugh emerged to help load some boxes and belongings into the building, suggesting that Sutton was possibly moving in with her recently minted paramour. The Wolverine star was seen on the busy New York street, dutifully carrying armfuls of belongings, possibly Sutton's, back into his apartment. The images appear to be at odds with recent reports that the couple's relationship had hit a 'rough patch'. The GMA hosts steered well clear of asking Hugh any personal or challenging questions, instead lavishing the actor with praise. 'Sometimes I feel more relaxed on stage than I do in life,' Hugh admitted during his sit down. 'I don't know what it is. I'm living the dream.' His new award-winning play, written in 2020 by Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch, debuted on April 28 at New York's Minetta Lane Theatre and has already grabbed the attention of Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, who stepped out to support their close friend on Tuesday night. 'Ryan does a lot of things great, but dancing? Come on,' Hugh joked, as he took a swing at his Deadpool co-star. 'He actually heckled during the play. I said "Come on man, you're a movie star".' In Hugh's 'stripped down' off-Broadway show, the Greatest Showman actor swears liberally, speaks graphically about sex and engages in multiple steamy make-out sessions with his younger co-star. Asked when he first decided to make a big career change to theatre on GMA, Hugh said: 'It was about five years ago. 'I felt I wasn't doing the thing I loved to do enough. I wasn't acting enough. I thought if I was a professional violinist, I wouldn't not pick up a violin for four months. 'I love the theatre. I think it should be available for everyone.' Hugh plays a three-time divorced middle-aged college professor and novelist Jon, who embarks on a forbidden romance with his 19-year-old student Annie, played by Ella Beatty, 25, in intense two-hander, 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes'. Sutton also made a backstage appearance this week, amid rumours that their fledgling relationship has struggled since they went public in January. The new show may not be the easiest watch for her, with Hugh and his 25-year-old co-star kissing frequently, at one point making out on a desk as a scantily clad Ella wraps her legs around him. Another scene sees the young star – the daughter of Warren Beatty – sat in between Hugh's legs wearing nothing but her underwear and a red jacket as he kisses her head. Hugh also swears throughout, dropping F-bombs and at one point graphically detailing a college cheerleader's sex actt/ It's easy to see why audience members are banned from using phones. Set in a pre #MeToo era, the story explores discussions around sexual consent and power dynamics. In March, a source revealed to the Daily Mail that Hugh and his ex-wife Deborra-Lee Furness have yet to file for divorce because 'they are struggling to reach an agreement on how to divide their assets.' Hugh and Sutton met as co-stars on the 2022 Broadway revival of The Music Man, but only went public after they were pictured holding hands earlier this year.
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct'
We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of 'Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,' lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you've heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns. But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman's venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty's labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson's long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman's manhandling of an actual lawn mower. Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a 'world class college.' He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, 'racking up ex-wives like a maniac.' Currently he is separated from his third. Soon another cliché enters: the 'grossly underwritten' sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to 'expose their mediocrity.' That's Beatty's Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins. 'The erotics of pedagogy,' Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains. It is here you may say to yourself: I've seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays ('Oleanna') and novels ('Disgrace') — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man's point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie's lines are more like this: 'I shouldn't / I don't know why I / Said that / Sorry I'm mm.' Beatty, recently seen in Ibsen's 'Ghosts,' is all but ghostly here; she delivers Annie's halting vagueness so precisely that she at first seems merely underpowered as an actor. In fact, she's fulfilling the play's plan perfectly: Even if overwhelmed by Macklem's force majeure, she cannot seem like a victim. All but demanding his sexual attention, she tells Macklem that his books, in their crudity, taught her 'what I like.' She devours him hungrily, comparing him favorably to boys she has slept with. She shows him her own fiction, and laps up his besotted praise. She understands from the start, she says later, exactly what the 'exchange' was. So you're left to wonder: Who's grooming whom? And for what? With Macklem especially, the play wants to keep the issue of culpability unsettled as long as possible. That's a tough job, given the way time has trained us to presume absolute guilt in such situations; the affair takes place in 2014, a few years before #MeToo acquired its hashtag. Nor does Macklem's temper, which flares when Annie behaves in ways he considers irrational, give us confidence in his ability to transcend his ego. In those moments he seems merely bullheaded and cutting, a lot like that lawn mower. Who but Jackman could keep us guessing despite that? His onstage seductiveness has always been frank yet cheerful, its sharkiness couched in charm. When he played Peter Allen in 'The Boy From Oz,' women (and men) in the audience begged for his sweaty T-shirt at the end of the show. (In exchange for a donation to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, he obliged them.) To take advantage of that appeal, Rickson has Jackman deliver a lot of his lines directly to the audience, at one point while seated at the lip of the stage with his legs dangling down as if he were Judy Garland. But Jackman goes well beyond the brief. On the night I attended, when a woman in Row B started coughing loudly, it was clear that the man who'd played the exuberant, audience-coddling Allen — Garland's son-in-law — was not about to leave her uncared-for. Ad libbing, he offered her a bottle of water — and was clearly ready to deliver it in person. She said no, but I was surprised that the 400 other theatergoers didn't start hacking immediately. He had them just where Macklem wanted Annie, and possibly vice versa. For an audience no less than an individual, the steep slope of powerful attraction is difficult to negotiate. Neither Macklem nor Annie (she's given no last name) is sure-footed. He's an overinflated balloon, blowing himself through life. She's, well, 19. Beyond any other consideration — attraction, power, psychology, class — her absolute age, not the gap in their ages, is what Moscovitch wants us to consider. Annie is not yet a fully grown human; she barely has the emotional wherewithal to handle her impulses, to know which ones she can safely indulge. Lest I spoil the ingenious working out of the story, I won't say more except that we meet Annie again when she does have that wherewithal. That both she and Macklem have aged we see at once by the simplest of means: posture, diction, a change of clothes for her, a change of glasses for him. (The costumes are by Ásta Bennie Hostetter.) Whether either character has grown is a different question, one you'll have to decide for yourself. Is revenge growth? Is growth itself revenge? That's the thrill of Rickson's production: It doesn't tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider. Better yet, it achieves that payoff with minimal fuss. The set (by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones) needs only a few chairs, a desk and a lamp to place you anywhere you need to be. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound consists mostly of faint music, the kind you sometimes think you hear while falling into a dream. There are no microphones; the actors' actual voices are hitting your actual ears. If this is theater on a shoestring, let the theater never have shoes. And though I'll wait to proclaim the Audible x Together experiment a sustainable success — at least until its next production, 'Creditors,' with Liev Schreiber, Maggie Siff and Justice Smith, opens later this month — 'Sexual Misconduct' is proof of concept even as a one-off. Those cheap tickets buy you not only a seat at the Minetta Lane but also a place in the living conversation of raw yet thoughtful theater. Plus maybe, if you cough enough, a bottle of water.
