Hugh Jackman to Play Billy Bigelow in New CAROUSEL Film?

Stage and screen star Hugh Jackman, who recently returned to Broadway in Jez Butterworth's THE RIVER, is reportedly preparing for a new musical role. In a recent interview with Cigar Aficionado, Jackman revealed that a new film version of Carousel is in the works. Jackman previously played the role of Billy Bigelow in a 2002 concert version of the musical at Carnegie Hall.

Jackman is an Academy Award®-nominated, Golden Globe® and Tony Award®-winning actor. The Australian native was most recently on Broadway in his one-man show Hugh Jackman - Back on Broadway in the fall of 2011. Jackman's dedication to the Broadway community was feted at the 2012 Tony Awards, where he received a Special Award from the Tony Awards Administration Committee, recognizing his accomplishments as a performer and humanitarian. He previously starred on Broadway in Keith Huff's play, A Steady Rain, opposite Daniel Craig, and as 1970s singer-songwriter Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, for which he received the 2004 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical as well as Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Theatre World Awards.

Additional theater: Carousel at Carnegie Hall, Oklahoma! at the National Theatre in London (Olivier nomination), Sunset Boulevard (MO Award, Australia's Tony Award) and Disney's Beauty and the Beast (MO Award nomination). Jackman made his first major U.S. film appearance as Wolverine in the first installment of the X-Men series, a role he reprised in the enormously successfulX2 and X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, as well as X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009 and in The Wolverine in 2013. Jackman reunited with the X-men team for X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Carousel is the second musical by the team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics). The 1945 work was adapted from Ferenc Molnár's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline. The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He attempts a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child; after it goes wrong, he is given a chance to make things right. A secondary plot line deals with millworker Carrie Pipperidge and her romance with ambitious fisherman Enoch Snow. The show includes the well-known songs "If I Loved You", "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never Walk Alone". Richard Rodgers later wrote that Carouselwas his favorite of all his musicals.