The Greatest Showman and Mary Poppins want to join forces for a musical, as Hugh Jackman and Emily Blunt told each other during their sit-down for Variety’s recently released Actors on Actors series.
As Hollywood’s long awards season begins to heat up, Jackman (who starred in this year’s political drama The Front Runner as Gary Hart) and Blunt (who starred as the titular character in Disney’s movie musical Mary Poppins Returns) spoke to each other about their experiences traversing the genres of musicals, action, drama, and more on the screen.
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A Tony winner for The Boy From Oz, Jackman produced and starred in last year’s The Greatest Showman, featuring a score by Dear Evan Hansen’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. This year, Blunt stars in her second movie musical with Mary Poppins Returns after working with director-choreographer Rob Marshall on Into the Woods.
“Shall we do a musical together?” Blunt asked Jackman.
“I’m totally in,” Jackman said.
“I want to do The King and I, but you can't do that with me,” said Blunt. “Inappropriate. [But] I thought that was so beautiful. I was obsessed with that movie as a kid.”
“I think you should do it and you will be great. You have a beautiful voice,” Jackman encourages. “Would you be fine 15 or 20 years from now going, ‘Yeah, never did that musical’? Or is part of you like, ‘I want to do a stage musical’?”
She responded: “I do want to do a play again. I feel like I need to get back on the stage again and do something. We'll do that since we can't do The King and I. I'm not sure I have the guts to do a stage musical yet.”
The two stars spoke about what makes a movie musical work, and that’s when Jackman revealed that The Greatest Showman was originally going to be written by pop stars. “The studio said, 'Let's have the writer of the day write songs. Well have five [writers]. We'll have Pharrell; we'll have Bruno Mars; we'll have cool songs and we'll play them on the radio,'” Jackman explains. “These young guys Justin and Benj somehow got through and wrote a song that was in our first three, and then they wrote another and were two of five, and by the end, it was all their songs."
Watch the full interview below:
