168 - Hugh Jackman: Reflections on acting, identity, personal transformation, and being Wolverine

Attia: 'I think it's one of my favorite activities that augments my mental health. It's a place where I can be as honest as I can be anywhere.' He uses journaling in combination with regular psychotherapy and DBT. The recovery contract was operationalized through daily journaling — naming each trade-off as it was made. Jackman's parallel: at Esther Perel's recommendation, he reviewed two volumes of journals with sticky notes and wrote 26,000 words of a book chapter in a single day from that material.

Attia: 'When I wrote out my recovery contract a year ago — this was a very important part of that recovery contract, which was being able to on a daily basis journal about the trade-off, which is: if you start to prioritize your eulogy over your resume you will make deliberate trade-offs that may sacrifice your performance in the short run, and you have to be able to accept that.' He frames Esther Perel's therapeutic contribution as specifically insisting the trade-off be named — 'don't just sort of shove it under the rug and say well I'm just going to be much more focused on my family and act like that doesn't matter.'

Attia: 'If you're willing to exercise nearly every day, like you're going to end up in a good place. Exercise is a very potent gero-protective agent — it's potent, it really has a strong impact, it's diffuse, it acts in many different parts of the body.' He uses the sedentary counterfactual to make the point viscerally: someone our age laid up for a week in the hospital — it could take six months to recover physically. That is the potency of what you lose when you stop.

The tip came from a professional natural bodybuilder Jackman trained with during X-Men Origins. Jackman: 'I assumed to be in his shape you have to just smash it. He starts super light on everything — it's fun, and builds up. He doesn't do one warm-up set then three smashing it — lightly, so by the time you're doing your third, fourth set you actually really want to lift. Your body's got used to it.' Jackman has carried this into his personal training practice since and cites it as one of the most practically useful training lessons of his career.

Jackman describes a set of pre-show triggers he uses to reliably enter his performance state: wearing aftershave (reserved for stage shows only), standing in the wings listening to the audience gather without looking through any gap, and in the first seconds on stage immediately finding the eyes of someone he knows. He also considered warming up on the foam roller on stage as the audience entered — both to demystify the performance and to shift his own preparation earlier — but was talked out of it for security reasons. The ritual package acts as a transition signal from touring fatigue to full presence.

Attia: 'If I anchor to my eulogy and not my resume — which is sort of my mission statement in life: make your eulogy better than your resume — then I just say look, these people here, these little people, these kids are the ones that are gonna matter at my eulogy.' He describes coming home after shooting poorly and seeing his boys playing — the frustration at bad performance becomes easy to dismiss against what actually matters. Jackman's parallel: 'I want to focus on following your fear, the thing that scares you — there's some illumination in that — and having something to say and doing it for other people.'

Attia: 'Ultimately relationships are probably going to play a greater role in the quality of your life than the length of your life.' He cites David Foster Wallace's This Is Water commencement address — the myriad petty ways we can sacrifice for other people as the building blocks of a meaningful life. Jackman seconds with his friend Gus's suicide-prevention charity Gotcha for Life: the core principle being 'never worry alone' — ensure at least one person exists with whom nothing is off the table.

Attia describes the contract as requiring him to acknowledge, on a daily basis, the dialectical tension between present sacrifice and long-term values: 'it is okay to say goodbye to an opportunity today in exchange for something that you value more in the long run — and it's okay to acknowledge that that's a trade-off.' The chapter in his book derived almost entirely from journals kept under this contract — 26,000 words written in a single day from sticky-noted pages across two volumes of journals, at Perel's recommendation.

Attia: 'I think most of my drive came from a negative place… pretty much everything I did came from a place of self-flogging and therefore I think there's really no scenario under which that's the right thing.' He frames the parenting challenge as how to cultivate drive in children from a positive place — and describes not yet knowing the answer. Jackman's correlate: his father's advice was that he praised his children too much, suggesting that expected behaviors rewarded with excessive praise can produce the same anxious need to perform.

Jackman: 'I always had a kind of connection to her and a sort of understanding that she loved me, that she had done her best.' He describes never being angry at his mother and instead channeling the hole into hyperperformance: 'That perfectionism in me is — you've got to work really hard to make sure people don't leave.' Attia draws the clinical parallel through Paul Conti's trauma framework: two siblings can adapt oppositely to identical circumstances, both adaptively at the time and both eventually maladaptive. The adaptation Jackman chose — staying in everyone's good graces, never letting anyone find out about mischief — worked professionally for decades before becoming counterproductive.

Jackman: 'I had to say I was really adamant about what we were going to do... there was resistance for sure, not amongst the key people at Fox — they were like let's go for it — but then it was like oh if we go R-rated it's probably 100 million we're leaving on the table.' He credits the title change as equally essential: 'We've spent 17 years building a brand. You don't suddenly call the Harley Davidson Terry.' The scene of Laura tipping the cross over into an X at Logan's grave Jackman describes as the most emotionally accurate ending of his career.

Jackman: 'I'm actually an introvert by nature, not an extrovert, but somehow I can feel on a stage, even like in San Diego that night, more relaxed — I would say my heartbeat is even lower apart from when I'm dancing.' He explains this as aligned with the acting vocation — knowing thyself, Socratic sense. The most spiritual moments of his life have all been on stage. Contrasted with the hotel-room isolation of touring — every night eating in-room, no socializing — which he describes as 'monk-like' and profoundly draining. The energy that surprised Attia at the San Diego visit came from exactly this matching: jumping in a pool with kids is also a form of genuine play that recharges rather than depletes an introvert who has been 'performing alone' for weeks.