Logan star Boyd Holbrook reveals he did not get his Aussie accent from Hugh Jackman
BOYD Holbrook is a rising American movie star with an oddly convincing Australian accent. His Logan co-star Hugh Jackman didn’t teach it to him.
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BOYD Holbrook, the Kentucky actor who causes trouble for Wolverine in Hugh Jackman’s last outing as the much-loved mutant, Logan, has never been to Australia.
And yet he can pull off an Aussie accent Meryl Streep would be proud of — a skill he deployed a couple of years ago playing a scuba diving instructor who tumbled around with Kristen Wiig in The Skeleton Twins.
“What did you think of it, huh? Did I pass?” he asks.
Even if he wasn’t any good at it, Holbrook argues we Aussies have no grounds to criticise: “I love how you guys can come over here and bastardise our accent as much as you want!” he jibes.
It wasn’t some Hollywood dialect coach that helped Holbrook turn his Kentucky drawl into an Aussie one. So who was it?
“Your little national treasure Sia,” he reveals. “She’s a friend of mine. She helped me out for a little bit.”
He calls the pop queen “a wild one” and when asked how they became friends, simply replies: “You get in there and figure it out.”
“She’s great,” he adds, “she’s such a beautiful soul. She’s been so kind to me.”
At 35, Holbrook is an actor on the verge. He started his film career with a small role in 2008’s Milk and his incremental rise through movies like Gone Girl and Liam Neeson actioners A Walk Among the Tombstones and Run All Night led to Netflix series Narcos.
Playing one of the real-life DEA agents who brought down Pablo Escobar, the series “put me on the map a little bit,” he says with some understatement.
In Logan, he has a showy role as Donald Pierce, a tattooed, gold-toothed bad guy with a bionic hand who’s been cooking up mutants in a lab south of the border. He has no particular vendetta against Wolverine until one of his mutant children escapes — a young girl called Laura — and finds her way to the X-Men icon.
“Pierce is a brilliant engineer, pioneering this robotic neuroscience,” Holbrook explains. “He’s loose, he’s very malleable, he’s a bit of a snake ... I’ve got no beef with anybody until my product (Laura) is gone and I need it back. It’s as simple as that.”
Holbrook had a lot of input into Pierce’s look — “picked out the neck tatt, picked out the sunnies,” he says — but was well aware Logan was Jackman’s show.
“I’m a listen and take notes kind of guy — take what you take and give what you can give,” he says. “Hugh leads by example quite a bit and if he’s busting his ass, you better bet everyone else is busting their ass. There’s no free lunch.”
The pressure of Logan being Jackman’s Wolverine swan song was strong going in.
“But as soon as I met Hugh, that put the kibosh on it,” Holbrook says. “Hugh just made light of it.”
The movie’s tone is a grim shift away from X-Men films of yore — it’s more a gritty western or violent road movie — but the rancorous back and forth between Pierce and Wolverine is one of its bright spots.
“Not to be too narcissistic or anything about myself, but I’m such a huge fan of Hugh’s and he’s been telling me: ‘You took something small on a page and you really made it yours and you really made it big’,” Holbrook says. “To get a compliment like that from someone like Hugh, it goes a long way.”
He reckons fans who have followed Jackman’s X-Men journey for the past 17 years are “gonna be very satisfied” with his farewell. And fans of comic book films in general, he adds, are in for a surprise.
“I think it’s going to shatter some of these Avengers films — in this world, Logan just seems a really fresh thing.”
Acting wasn’t a lifetime goal for Holbrook, mostly because he didn’t think it was achievable. But a few years out of high school he had a chance encounter with a Kentuckian who’d pulled it off — Michael Shannon. On Shannon’s advice, he started working at a theatre in his hometown as a carpenter. There, a girl asked to take his picture. That got him a modelling agent in New York and modelling money allowed him to send himself to film school.
“I always wanted to do it (acting), but I didn’t think that I spoke well enough or had good enough educational background or something like that. But it’s something I’ve really fallen in love with and I’m just starting to really know it and how to manipulate it and make it mine,” he says.
To that end, Holbrook is now shooting his first lead role — well, lead human at least — in the new Predator movie, directed by Shane Black (The Nice Guys, Iron Man 3).
“Time is right,” he says. “This didn’t happen overnight — I’ve been working for 10 years for this. I want a piece of my pie; I wanna do some lead roles.”
He reckons “leading man stuff is easy” and it’s where “really excellent actors like Christian Bale or Joaquin Phoenix” go to have fun.
That said, Holbrook’s not planning on playing it safe.
“I’d rather swing for the fence and hit a home run or strike out. I wanna make exciting work; I wanna make really exciting, chameleon characters.”
SEE Logan opens today
Originally published as Logan star Boyd Holbrook reveals he did not get his Aussie accent from Hugh Jackman
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