BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Superman is kissing Michael Caine, I thought. I was watching the murder thriller Deathtrap, where Christopher Reeve plays a screenwriting student whose mentor invites him over to discuss his play. It appears that the mentor will kill the student and steal the play. It turns out the student and mentor are lovers plotting to kill the mentor’s wife. Jordon Schildcrout recalled that at a 1982 screening in Dayton, Ohio, one audience member yelled, “No, Superman, don’t do it!” when this kissing scene arrived.

As I thought about the scene, a story about Hugh Jackman came to mind. In a 60 Minutes interview in 2013, he mentioned appearing in the Broadway musical A Man from Oz, where he played gay Australian musician Peter Allen. During one performance, when Jackman’s character leaned over to kiss Jarrod Emick, the actor playing his boyfriend dying from AIDS, an audience member yelled, “Don’t do it, Wolverine!”

On one level, this is simply an association game. However, I would submit these two scenes capture something vital about Reeve and Jackman. Both became celebrities by playing superheroes. Both chafed against that label by playing characters that subvert what viewers expect an action movie star to play.

The similarities continue. Both started in the theatre. Both became known for their values (behaving well in public and private). Reeve biographer Chris Nickson dubbed him “a gentleman and a superhero.” The Guardian wrote that Jackman “has long enjoyed a reputation as one of Hollywood’s nicest A-listers, to the extent that he has to deny it.”

Most interestingly, both played superheroes in periods when the genre was seen as a huge gamble. When Reeves was cast in Superman, the only available model (unless you consider Danger: Diabolik an antihero superhero movie) was the Adam West Batman show and movie adaptation. When Jackman was cast in X-Men, Tim Burton’s Batman movies were a memory, and while a few interesting cult offerings like Darkman had appeared, Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin seemed to have scuppered the genre. Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four captures this chaotic period rather well.

Yet for all the similarities, Jackman’s career has taken directinos that Reeve’s career did not.

How to Be More Than a Superhero?

As a whole, Jackman has succeeded where Reeve struggled—at evolving beyond his superhero persona. Reeve did some excellent work after playing Superman, both as an actor and director. Even his 1995 accident did not slow down many his accomplishments: he directed the HBO movie In the Gloaming two years later. Yet, leaving aside Reeve’s advocacy work and directing, he often seemed like the Peter Cushing of superhero cinema: the actor who always brought something interesting but rarely appeared in great films. Once you get past Superman I and II, Somewhere in Time, and Remains of the Day, it’s hard to remember a great post-Superman film featuring Reeve. Mostly, he became known for his theatre work after appearing in Superman.

In contrast, Jackman has thrived in both theatre (The Boy from Oz, The Music Man), films with theatrical overtones (Les Miserables, The Greatest Showman), and blockbuster films (Real Steel, Prisoners). He has done well enough that after appearing in Logan, he announced he was retiring from superhero movies.

Yet, that could all change this year. Jackman will return in what looks like the biggest gamble since X-Men: appearing in Deadpool & Wolverine, a sillier superhero story coming out at a time when few silly superhero movies other than the original Deadpool seem to be finding audiences. Also a time when some worry that “superhero fatigue” means the whole superhero concept has had its day.

As we wait for Deadpool & Wolverine to appear in July 2024 and for the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story to appear in September 2024, it’s worth looking at Reeves and Jackman. How has Jackman flourished where Reeves struggled?

The Right Cape at The Right Time

Certainly, one reason is what Deathtrap writer Ira Levin called “the breaks.” In Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby, one character chats with an aspiring actor and tells him that he will go far, provided he gets the breaks. Jackman played Wolverine because behind-schedule filming on Mission Impossible 2 meant Dougray Scott couldn’t play Wolverine, and a quick replacement was required. Reeve played Superman partly because Patrick Wayne quit the film when his father was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

Of course, there are also downsides to some breaks. Few see Adam West’s Batman movie as the first modern superhero film: Superman carries that spot nearly every time. If Jackman was one of the first actors to rejuvenate superhero films after a bad decade, Reeve was the first actor to create the movement. Pioneers rarely get a chance to reinvent themselves.

And there are also bad breaks: Reeve had limited acting options after his accident paralyzed him from the neck down. All creatives live at the mercy of timing and circumstance, but actors have less control over those factors than directors or producers.

Will People Love the Superhero?

Audiences are another key factor. It’s not easy to tell which ambitious project will resonate immediately with people and which will gain admirers over time.

Both Reeves and Jackman appeared in ambitious box office flops—most recently, Jackman starred in Reminiscence. However, audiences have been kinder on opening weekend to his films. Two of Reeve’s best-known movies after Superman (Somewhere in Time, Street Smart) took a while to connect with viewers. Jackman’s Les Miserables has its detractors, but it did well with audiences—which, as Cats showed, is not guaranteed when Tom Hooper makes a musical.

What those audiences expect from the movie is also important. Again, most audiences connected superhero movies with Adam West’s Batman when Reeve made Superman. That expectation helps explain why Lex Luthor is a camp villain in the Superman movies. It also goes a long way to explain why replacement Superman II director Richard Lester brought more humor to the movie when he came on board. Despite the problems, Superman II turned out all right. However, the 2005 release of Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut showed how much more epic things could have been. The next two Superman films only got sillier.

In contrast, Jackman benefitted from the fact that the first X-Men movie set a consistently serious tone—possibly the first superhero movie to do so. The Dark Knight trilogy and the Marvel Cinematic Univerise’s first phase often get credited with bringing a kind of realism to superhero movies. That is, they had a style that implied the story was set in the real world we live in, except that world happens to have superheroes. Call it a variation on George Lucas’s “used future” concept. However, the first X-Men movie took this approach five years before Batman Begins. It generally favored realistic set design over Burton or Schumacher’s otherworldly “planet Gotham” sets. Its script avoided camp or slapstick—not something to be taken for granted, given that Men in Black writer Ed Solomon contributed to its script. It didn’t emulate the most recent comic book movie success—the camp vampire blaxploitation extravaganza movie Blade, released two years earlier.

X-Men was arguably America’s first “serious and realistic” superhero movie,[1] and audiences were ready for it. Consequently, when Jackman untethered from his first superhero movie director (Bryan Singer), other superhero projects (The Wolverine, Logan) gave him room to do serious stories. Reeve found that when he untethered from Richard Donner, his new superhero projects got sillier and sillier.

Every Superhero Needs Teammates

No discussion about why an actor succeeds in a move would be complete without mentioning collaborators. The fact that actors have less control over their careers or the resulting product than directors means that who they work with determines a lot about their futures.

Reeve was great as Superman in all four films, but infighting behind the scenes of Superman I led Donner to leave, and the franchise faltered. When the legendarily bad production company Cannon Films got involved in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, the writing was on the wall.

Jackman also suffered problems when his superhero franchise’s original director left: X-Men movies not directed by Bryan Signer tend to be hit or miss. But (X-Men Origins: Wolverine aside), the X-Men spinoffs featuring Wolverine have succeeded. Logan was particularly notable because its team succeeded at making a serious R-rated superhero film when most of the industry had failed (for example, see Zack Snyder’s Watchmen).

Equally important, the fact that the X-Men movies are ensemble movies meant that Jackman had acting collaborators to help him carry the stories. It’s tempting to wonder how Reeve would have done in a well-cast Superman sequel featuring Supergirl or the Justice League, a movie where he didn’t have to carry the heroic weight alone.

So, we can say that many of the reasons why Jackman has thrived where Reeve struggled have to do with the usual things actors must face: how to find that perfect mix of timing, circumstances, and collaborators to make great movies. Jackman had the right factors, and he had them at the right time—when superhero films were allowed to be serious. As a result, his three Wolverine films have critically fared better critically overall than Reeve’s four Superman films.

Gentlemen and Superheroes

However, there is another element that may sees insignificant at first: family informs career. Talking about family is old-fashioned, but “old-fashioned” is a word that easily comes to mind when people talk about Reeve and Jackman. Also, “gentlemanly,” a world that implies a combination of good manners, responsibility, consistency, and healthy relationships.

Neither Reeve nor Jackman have perfect public records. Reports about Reeve’s behavior when adjusting to his new fame while playing Superman showed he could be difficult. However, whether it’s Glenn Close remembering Reeve’s friendship with Julliard classmate Robin Williams or Somewhere in Time extra Jo Addie remembering Reeve’s diplomacy with autograph hunters, he was more often known for his character than his flaws.

Similar words apply to Jackman. For example, the wave of stories priming audiences for Deadpool & Wolverine included a People profile where Jackman talked with Ryan Reynolds about how their friendship has lasted since making X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In a time when celebrity friendships seem contrived, their conversation came across as genuine: two people who care about making sure each other do well. “We rely on each other for the real kind of advice that you want,” Reynolds said.

So. Superheroes and gentlemen.

However, part of being a gentleman is integration—standing for good values in public and private. Can someone hold those values well in their private lives, around their family? Super/Man co-director Peter Ettedgui said in a Collider interview that the documentary began with the fact that Reeve, “the original cinema superhero… after his tragic accident, became a hero in real life.” Then, after meeting Reeve’s three children, the documentary became “about family, about love, about legacy.”

Family and love is often the hardest part of having character. Reeve and Jackman both became known for prioritizing their families. In the 60 Minutes interview, Jackman and his wife, Deborah Lee-Furness, discussed choosing to move their family for each film. In the 2023 Guardian interview, Jackman reflected that if he could change anything, “I would have moved around less… But I thought – Deb and I thought – at the time: I’m doing movies; the lesser of two evils is to have everyone together. I’m not 100% sure, but sometimes stability may have been more beneficial.”

In his biography Still Me, Reeve explains why he declined several lucrative TV offers in the early 1990s that would have revived his movie career. The roles required moving to Los Angeles, which he and his wife Dana didn’t want to do. It also would have affected his two children living with his ex-partner, Gae Exton:

“It was always comforting to know that if Matthew or Al needed me for any reason, I could hop on the Concorde and be in London in a few hours. Sometimes I flew over to watch a soccer match or just to spend a weekend. I never missed either of their birthdays. Los Angeles would have added another three thousand miles between us.”

If being a gentleman is about family and love, not just achievements, it eventually involves making sacrifices. Reeve was a hero onstage and off because of his gentlemanly values, which led him to pursue family over career success. Even before his accident, his character had decided where his career would go.

The question that Reeve faced, what it means to be a gentleman and a superhero, is where Jackman finds himself today.

Career-wise, Deadpool & Wolverine has returned Jackman to where he was when he accepted playing Wolverine: a big gamble on a superhero film that could become a silly misfire. The Deadpool movies (and the recent Marvel movies like Thor: Love and Thunder and recent DC movies like Birds of Prey) have, in varying ways, all embraced absurdity over the “serious and realistic” school. As in the 1990s, silliness is in—although given the muted responses to recent Marvel films, it’s not clear that audiences want it.

Relationship-wise, Jackman is where Reeve was in the 1990s: a gentleman figuring out what to do when his family unit has split. In 2023, Jackman and Lee-Furness announced they were ending their marriage after 27 years. His situation differs somewhat from Reeve: Reeve’s two children were minors when he split from Exton, while Jackman’s two children are in their late teens and early twenties. He won’t have Reeve’s joint custody commuting problems. Still, if being a gentleman implies integration, the family affects the career and vice versa, then how Jackman handles his family changing will affect where his career goes next.

It’s going to be interesting to see where Jackman goes next. He is, after all, probably the most interesting superhero actor since Christopher Reeve.

[1] Some fans will argue that M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, released the same year, had a similarly serious tone. That’s perfectly fair, but X-Men appeared five months earlier.

For more content about superhero films from Fellowship & Fairydust, read:

At the Country Club with Superman