Hugh Jackman Steps Outside Usual Role With ‘Pan’ Character

“He showed me – it actually had my face superimposed – the wig of Marie Antoinette, the costume of Loius the 14th, with all these rings of like a rapper, and I was like, I’m in!” he says.

The hero gets an assist from a wisecracking woman-chaser in his 30s, who deserts the lad in a crisis – but, of course, returns to save the day.

When director Joe Wright shared his vision for Blackbeard, Jackman just couldn’t resist. “Anna Karenina”, here I come.

But it was in Hollywood that someone waved the Pan screenplay under his nose.

Screenwriter Jason Fuchs, 29, has been thinking about the origins of Peter Pan ever since he and his father got stuck on the Peter Pan ride at Disney World, when he was 9-years-old. “Pan” is from the point of view of an 11-year-old, and it’s shamelessly optimistic and energetic, and I always want to be a part of that”. I hated childhood. I found it a really hard period of life. It reminded me of myself as a boy and, also, of my son. Halfway through I’m like, why is Hugh showing this film to us?

“I told my friends there’s free biscuits and cookies and stuff at the office, but it didn’t work”.

Wright’s upbringing in London was inevitably fantasy-riddled, what with parents who were puppeteers and co-founders of Islington’s Little Angel Theatre.

As Pan offers Peter’s origin, we learn that he may be the child spoken of in a prophecy, one who has the power to end Blackbeard’s evil reign. His chief cinematic memories?

Steven Spielberg made a sequel called “Hook”, starring Robin Williams with Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell.

There are scores of other movies that played around with the Pan myth-and even a popular musical version that enabled Mary Martin to fly into the living rooms of America via the TV set-but, plot-wise, they’re all post-Pan.

Maybe that’s why they thought to ask BlockWorks, a team of designers, architects and animators doing exceptional work with Minecraft maps, to recreate a vignette from the Peter Pan prequel that comes to cinemas a week on Friday.

CS: “Peter Pan” is also in the public domain, but if it wasn’t, this could be a story about a boy going to this fantastical world. The allegations of whitewashing are pretty serious, with Wright going out of his way to justify this decision, as with making the tribe in the film multicultural, but it didn’t give too much leeway to those offended by it. Yet, for the purposes of this review, I put my feelings on the matter aside and went into “Pan” with an open and excited mind. I’m not going to be one of them. But I defy you to look in its dead eyes, or at all the scenes and characters cribbed from Star Wars and Avatar, and tell me it’s a bear you haven’t seen dozens of times before.

What the film does not have is a single Darling on the premises-not a Mr. or a Mrs., not Wendy, not the boys, not even Nana, their Newfoundland nursemaid dog. The movie begins with Peter being left at an orphanage by his mother along with a note and a necklace. But those nods to the original story just delighted me and it’s like a little game of “Wink Murder” with the audience, they become a relationship with the audience that is there that I really enjoy.

The title character was not easily cast.

“After all, the blond-haired, 6’2” Minnesotan native couldn’t look more different to the middle-aged pirate we’ve become used to seeing in previous films, with his long dark hair and waxed mustachios. Then suddenly Levi popped up on the screen, and he had this incredibly talented, emotional openness, this kind of wonder and kind of bright excitement about the world and the possibilities and about acting. The marinating obviously helped.