Hugh Jackman made his much anticipated return to Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine years ago, and his tenth appearance as Logan (first in the MCU) makes Wolverine handily the most iconic, prolific performance of his career. Jackman remains one of the few comic book movie actors to practically own a character as intensely as Wolverine. However, Jackman’s best acting role exists outside any cinematic universe, and still taps into the rage that Wolverine is known for. This performance comes from a 2013 film directed by Dune: Part Three‘s Denis Villeneuve, Prisoners.
The film was a critical and commercial success, garnering acclaim for Villeneuve’s cryptic, haunting direction and the lead performances. The epic thriller sees Jackman and Gyllenhaal at odds, with the former tapping into the devastation of losing a child and the latter wearing all the world-weariness of his macabre career in a wired, exhausted performance. It is a major achievement for both Villeneuve and the two lead actors, a cryptic and disturbing drama that questions how far a person would go to do what they perceive to be the right thing, even if it requires making many difficult, dangerous decisions.
What Is Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Prisoners’ About?
Hugh Jackman’s Keller looking intense in PrisonersImage via Summit Entertainment
Prisoners follows Jackman as Keller Dover, a man taking justice into his own hands after his six-year-old daughter was kidnapped near their home, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki, a dedicated detective who is trying to solve the case while keeping Dover from making any rash decisions that could jeopardize the investigation.
The cryptic thriller puts Keller and Detective Loki on converging paths as they try to solve the mystery of where Keller’s missing daughter and her friend were taken. As Detective Loki tries to close in on the suspects, Keller has abducted someone of his own, who he believes has ties to the crime, and begins torturing him to find more information. In the process, Keller’s rage and hopelessness begin to overtake his soul, and Detective Loki discovers that the two missing girls are only a small part of a larger, mysterious web of violence and abuse.
Prisoners is a bleak, cold movie about a deep-seated kind of evil. The tone is so devastating at times that it almost turns to outright horror, echoing the chilling atmosphere of Osgood Perkins‘ recent hit film, Longlegs, which also centers on an investigation into brutal murders that make up a mysterious killer’s grand design.
What Makes Hugh Jackman’s ‘Prisoners’ Performance Stand Out?
Keller (Hugh Jackman) pins down Alex (Paul Dano) in ‘Prisoners’.Image via Warner Bros.
Jackman has always played rage incredibly well. You see that coming through in each of his appearances as Wolverine, especially in James Mangold‘s Logan.But the ferocity of Keller Dover, a desperate man who feels as though he truly has nothing to lose in the pursuit of retrieving his child, brings an even more grounded and compelling anger out of Jackman which is equal parts sympathetic and terrifying.
Keller is losing his faith in every system and facet of his life in the midst of a hopeless situation, and it drives him to a position where he begins to question his own sense of morality. Jackman goes into the depths of Keller’s psyche as this crisis of faith and morality plays out, swinging back and forth between primal rage and exhausted despair. In one of the most quietly devastating scenes, Keller sits across Loki and looks through photographs of recovered, bloody children’s clothes (thankfully, later revealed to be a red herring of clothes covered in pig blood). He recognizes one clothing item, believes his child may be dead, and softly points at the photo and says “you let this happen,” before getting up and leaving. This scene plays incredibly heavily, and in stark contrast to the furious nature of many of Jackman’s other big moments in the film. We expect to see him kick into hero mode or scream with such force that the room would shake, but instead, he feels utterly hollow and defeated in the face of an unimaginable tragedy, which makes for one of the most powerful moments Jackman has ever played on screen.
Being an actor with a theatrical background, whether he is singing in a circus-set musical, performing reality-defying magic tricks in The Prestige, or slashing through Sentinels in an X-Men movie, Jackman tends to play characters living fairly spectacular lives, and doing spectacular things. Prisoners is a movie which places him square in the middle of a dark, cold reality where nothing is extravagant and everything is deeply muted. Jackman reigns it in appropriately, matching the tone of the film and giving a performance that does feel incredibly lived-in, making his outbursts even more effective.
Denis Villeneuve Pushed His Actors To Their Limit on ‘Prisoners’ Set
Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) talking to Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) in ‘Prisoners.’Image via Warner Bros.
For a story as intense and dark as Prisoners, the actors were going to be put through the wringer. One of the most intense scenes comes when Keller threatens Alex Jones (no, not that Alex Jones), the man he has kidnapped, portrayed by Paul Dano, with a hammer. Villeneuve encouraged Jackman to tap into his own rage, and to improvise Keller’s interrogation of Alex.
Keller brandishes a hammer, while pinning Alex to a bathroom wall, and threatens to break his hand with it if Alex does not admit to the location of the girls. When Alex is unresponsive, Keller slams the hammer into the wall right next to Alex’s head. This moment came as a shock to Dano, who did not know Jackman was going to do that and was terrified in the moment. Jackman said he was exhausted by the filming of this scene, and that it pushed him to his absolute limits. That exhaustion and anger may have felt a little too real for Jackman on set, and it definitely comes through in the movie.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Thankfully, Dano took it well, and understood what Jackman was doing was all in service of the work, saying, “Hugh is a kind and good man. Trust is the biggest thing, no matter what kind of film you’re making. We trusted each other, and our director…” Villeneuve brought something out of Jackman that even the world-weary, cynical, and brutish Wolverine has never quite managed on screen. Deadpool & Wolverine has no shortage of explosive outbursts from Jackman, but it would be nearly impossible to surpass the raw, animalistic wrath that Jackman displayed during this Prisoners sequence.
‘Prisoners’ Feels Like a Product of a Bygone Era
While the industry has shifted away from the movie star model in favor of intellectual property being the driving force behind a movie’s draw, the success of movies like Prisoners is proof of how much higher a great, original film can soar on the shoulders of movie star performances. Gyllenhaal and Jackman elevate nearly every project they are a part of, and putting the two of them together on screen is a guarantee that a movie will at least manage to have solid acting. The two of them, operating at their peaks, are able to take a mid-budget, adult-oriented, nearly three-hour-long dramatic thriller, and turn it into a $122 million dollar-grossing movie.
This kind of thing does not happen as often now as it did in decades past, when a movie like David Fincher’s Se7en, even more disturbed and made on an even smaller budget, could turn into a massive sensation. Despite Prisoners being just over a decade old, it feels like even in the past 11 years, things have changed radically. A weighty, thematically dark, mature original story like Prisoners feels much more like fodder for a prestige TV miniseries in the 2020s, while these kinds of stories used to attract major stars and end up being big box office draws in addition to garnering critical or awards acclaim. While it is a major success in nearly every regard, Jackman’s performance is the powerful heart and soul at the center of the dark, unrelenting labyrinth that is Prisoners.
