Even the best get too involved: Hugh Jackman tells of when he let himself go on the set of Prisoners, at the invitation of Denis Villeneuve, against poor Paul Dano.
In 2013, many years before embarking on the epic feat of DuneDenis Villeneuve he signed Prisonersa dramatic thriller about the kidnapping of two little girls, in which a desperate father, played by Hugh Jackman, decided to undertake a personal investigation and take justice alone against the pedophile, allegedly guilty of the kidnapping. It was perhaps Hugh Jackman’s darkest role, known to all as a lovable and witty man and, above all, a real mine of anecdotes. And Jackman himself told an unedited episode that took place on the set of the film in a recent video interview with web radio Sirius XM, regarding the success of Prisoners are Netflix.
Hugh Jackman loses control on the set, at the request of Denis Villeneuve
During the interview, Jackman says he is very proud of Prisoners and when asked what he remembers about the experience on the set, he comes up with the following anecdote:
I remember a scene with Paul Dano… I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a pretty strong scene with Paul Dano where I, so to speak, “interrogate” him. We had been doing it for like 3 hours and I was completely destroyed and at the end we did this take and I remember thinking “we finally did it, this is good” and I remember then Denis came up to me and said he owed me talk: “You really have to go hard” and I say “didn’t I?”, “no, that’s not enough”. So I said “it’s fine”, he insisted I go down hard and we did another take. While we were shooting I was thinking that I had no idea what to do, because I had spent everything and what came out is the scene you see in the film, which was improvised. I really don’t know how Paul Dano talks to me again!.
If you haven’t seen Prisoners we invite you to do so, because Hugh Jackman is really scary in that scene and now we know why. Sometimes a director asks an actor to make a scene more believable to push himself to the limit and in that case Jackman really followed, at the risk of going too far, the instructions of Denis Villeneuve.
