“We need to really make something that makes me look very different from anything else,” Jackman recalls thinking.

The Death of Robin Hood star Hugh Jackman breaks down his wild physical transformation into the Prince of Thieves

"We need to really make something that makes me look very different from anything else," Jackman recalls thinking.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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June 18, 2026 11:00 a.m. ET

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Hugh Jackman in 'The Death of Robin Hood'. Credit:

Aidan Monaghan/A24

- Hugh Jackman says that his hair and makeup artists found his Robin Hood look by trying to "shake up the idea" of the character.

- *The Death of Robin Hood* director Michael Sarnoski adds that the team's "first crack" at finding the look was immediately spot-on: "Yep, that's the idea!"

- Jackman also says that he wanted Robin's physique to be "leaner" than his other roles.

Hugh Jackman doesn't quite look like himself in *The Death of Robin Hood*.

In the new period drama from *Pig *filmmaker Michael Sarnoski, the *Greatest Showman* star plays the Prince of Thieves in the last chapter of his life — so, fittingly, the character looks and feels significantly older than Jackman's 57 years. The actor sports a formidable wig of messy, gray-white hair that extends well past his shoulders, a massive, bushy beard, and a subtly wrinkled face.

Jackman tells ** that his longtime on-screen styling team, hair stylist Sean Flanigan and makeup artist Pamela Westmore, quickly came up with Robin Hood's look while on the set of another recent project.

Hugh Jackman in 'The Death of Robin Hood'.

"We were sitting in the makeup trailer of *Song Sung Blue*, just waiting to shoot and coming up with ideas and playing around," Jackman explains. "And Sean put up some photo of this guy with gray hair that kind of pulled back, and then he and Pam started working on something. We were like, 'We need to really make something that makes me look very different from anything else, but also just to really shake up the idea of Robin.' And that look just immediately felt great."

Sarnoski tells EW that he immediately knew that Flanagan and Westmore's vision was spot-on. "Their first crack at it was like, 'Yep, that's the idea!'" he remembers.

Sarnoski was impressed by how the team quickly established a Robin Hood who could visually evolve throughout the film.

Hugh Jackman in New York City on Dec. 10, 2025.

Cindy Ord/Getty

"Part of the thinking was we needed something that could go through some variations, because at the beginning, he's kind of like an ogre living in a cave," he explains. "So it needed to be something that, without cutting Hugh's hair or drastically changing the look, he could go from this beast in a cave to someone who's ready for battle with their hair tied back, and then someone that has a little more elegance to them later on."

He adds, "They just did an amazing job of finding this look that could say different things at different times in the movie."

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Jackman, unsurprisingly, stayed in peak physical condition to portray Robin Hood, though he wanted to differentiate his build from the superhuman bulk of a character like Wolverine.

"I knew there was a lot of physicality in it, so I was in shape**,** and I would do my normal routine," he says. "I wanted him to be a bit leaner, because we thought that's what the reality of a hermit would be."

*The Death of Robin Hood* has a few bursts of harsh, bloody action, which required fight training for Jackman and his costars. The rehearsals and the actual shooting days for the action scenes took a solid physical toll on the performers due to the extensive length of each take.

"As hard as it was on me, I don't know how anyone carried a camera through that," Jackman says of the damp brawl Robin undertakes against a foe played by Elijah Ungvary early in the film. "That mud was just brutal."

Hugh Jackman in 'The Death of Robin Hood'.

"That was all real mud," Sarnoski notes. "It was pouring rain the day we were shooting that stuff, and it was like a foot deep of mud. Hugh and Elijah got their faces buried in the mud."

Jackman appreciated the challenge of that particular sequence. "It was really cool, and those rehearsals were really great," he says.

The *Logan* star also explains how the strenuousness of the fight scenes doubled as an artistic choice. "When we were rehearsing, Elijah and I were so exhausted from this long battle and crawling and fighting, and we didn't want it to be pretty," he says. "We kept telling Michael just how tired we were and how we didn't want to be too cool."

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Jackman's actual exhaustion led to a beat that he considers his "favorite moment" in the film's fight sequences. "There was this one bit just before I kill Elijah's character, where before climbing up on top of his body to kill him, I was literally just, as Hugh, resting because I was exhausted. And we talked about it, Michael and I were like, 'That's kind of a cool moment. He's just lying on this man's chest.' In another film, they might've looked like lovers, weirdly. But there is a weird intimacy when you are battling, and you're hand-to-hand. There was something really cool about that."

Sarnoski adds, "The intimacy of violence is something that carries all the way through to the end of the movie. In all the variations of violence and killing that happens, we wanted there to be a deep intimacy."

*The Death of Robin Hood* hits theaters on June 19.

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