I have traveled for three days to meet Hugh Jackman in a seaside restaurant at the edge of the earth, yet in the end I arrive late. The place is so remote that even the local taxi driver gets lost, struggling to read Aboriginal place names in the dark. It's the end of the Australian winter; we have agreed to meet near his family retreat in Mount Eliza, a picturesque part of a southern peninsula where Ava Gardner once starred in a post-apocalyptic love story with Gregory Peck—a man whose gentlemanly ways Jackman seems to have inherited. He puts down his half-empty glass of wine and dismisses my flustered apologies with an old-school charm.

In Australia, Jackman's virtues are extolled by friends and strangers alike with such mind-numbing frequency, that when I refer to him as a national hero, a fan corrects me: "He's a demigod." This untarnished reputation has even become a point of ribbing. "Like you've heard from everybody else, he's a complete shit and absolutely impossible," jokes the laconic director Christopher Nolan, who cast Jackman as a dapper magician who feuds with a scruffier rival (played by Christian Bale) in The Prestige.

Beyond his looks, which speak for themselves, Jackman projects both gallantry and mischief. With his dark jeans and suit jacket, he is wearing a stripy woolen scarf apparently filched from the wardrobe of Dennis the Menace. There is a puckish wrinkle in his nose when he laughs, and he somehow triggers the fantasy that if one were to faint—which one might, right now, on purpose—he would swoop in and pick up the pieces. An old drama-school friend of his once said that Jackman was James Bond, he just didn't know it; ten years later he was offered the part, and turned it down. As he says now, with a Bond-like raised eyebrow: "You don't have to play the role to wear the suits."

Jackman is perhaps still best known as Wolverine, the smolderingly mysterious, adamantium-fisted hero of the X-Men series, a role in which he didn't so much steal the show as walk away with the entire franchise. This year he has entered a new era, both as an actor of exceptional range and as an imaginative producer of global ambition. A mere six years after his first American break, a considerable amount of momentum has built up around Jackman, whose command of Hollywood now translates into major production deals with 20th Century Fox, Universal, Disney, and CBS. As his friend Lachlan Murdoch suggests: "He gets along with everyone, and everyone has a huge amount of respect for him, not only in terms of what they see on the screen but as a human being. He is much more than just an actor."

Even as an actor, little in his action-hero or romantic-comedy past could have prepared audiences for Jackman's performances in (to name the latest three) Woody Allen's English farce, Scoop; Darren Aronofsky's gut-wrenching sci-fi romance, The Fountain; and Nolan's bravura historical thriller, The Prestige. In each of the last two, he even plays several selves: an American scientist, a twenty-sixth-century bald astronaut, and a sixteenth-century conquistador in The Fountain; and in The Prestige, a suave, turn-of-the-century magician and his Errol Flynn–like drunken double.

"It wasn't until we got in the edit suite and put the film together that I got to sit back and watch what he'd really done," says Nolan, whose new film combines the noir of his blockbuster, Batman Begins, with the twists of his breakthrough, Memento. Jackman's performance is "very subtle and it builds over the course of the film in a really specific way that he'd clearly planned very carefully." The ingenious plot of The Prestige hinges on the notion that magic-show audiences think they want to know the truth but actually love the thrill of being fooled. Jackman's character is the morally upright crowd-pleaser, and Bale, as his menacing nemesis, compels him to get his hands dangerously dirty. "The difference between the two magicians was crucial to the script," Nolan elaborates, "Christian's got a wonderful ability to shut himself off from the audience in that slightly lugubrious way, whereas Hugh has this innate ease with a live audience."