Every single time I watchTom Hooper’sCats—which, for the record, is at minimum twice a week—I wonder if any ingredient could have made this mind-melding stew of horny CGI abominations any more potent. Of course, there’s a right answer. And of course that answer isHugh Jackman, one of the most earnest, committed-to-cheese actors in Hollywood, who recently revealed he wasthisclose to putting on a mo-cap suit and gyrating his balls at a milk machine. (Presumably.)
“Umm… yep,” the Australian actor toldThe Daily Beastwhen asked if hisLes Miserablesdirector tried to recruit him for the visual feline orgy known asCats. Jackman continued, equally enthusiastically:
“You know, Tom rang me early on because we didLes Mistogether, and there were a couple of options there based on availability and time, and I really… yeah, I just wasn’t available at the time.”
When I was a kid, around 10 or 11 years old, I fell off the front of a boat and the vehicle drifted over my head. Most of the adults present agreed that if I didn’t know how to swim, there’s a chance I might have been caught in the propellers. It’s a traumatic, horrifying memory for me, and I only tell it to people in the most clipped version possible, because nobody likes to revisit the time they came within a hair’s breadth of certain, unimaginable disaster.
Anyway, that’s how I picture Hugh Jackman telling The Daily Beast he was almost inCats.
But man, he totally would have made that movie even better, wouldn’t he? Maybe “better” isn’t the right word. Hugh Jackman would have madeCatseven moreCatsthan it already was, which is a dangerous level ofCats. Almost nobody commits harder than Hugh Jackman. Over 17 years my dude transformed from a kind’ve scrawny cage fighter inX-Meninto literal Wolverine.The Greatest Showmanworks overtime to convince you P.T. Barnum wasn’t a terrible person through the sheer aggressiveness of Hugh Jackman’s twirling. Remember when Hugh Jackman ominously sang Nirvana to an army of ravenous children inPan? Good lord. Imagine that type of energy directed atCats. It would’ve completely altered the timeline. I sincerely believe that none of what we’re going through today would have occurred if Hugh Jackman sang that one song inCatswhere Rum Tum Tugger is like “miiiiiiiilk.” Viruses cannot thrive in that type of heat.
