Hugh Jackman as a Gritty, Anti-hero Version of Robin Hood? Count Us In!!!

There's no forest of Nottingham, no merry men, and definitely no tights. Hugh Jackman's The Death of Robin Hood is a gritty, body-count take on the legend, and the way he described it, count us in.

The idea came from writer-director Michael Sarnoski, who made Pig with Nicolas Cage and A Quiet Place: Day One. Jackman read the script, sent to him by a producer friend, and was immediately drawn in. It's built from a short ballad about the death of Robin Hood that Sarnoski first read at ten years old, the image of a mythic hero dying quietly in a bed in a priory. From that, he imagined what life would be like years after the merry men disbanded, carrying the weight of having been an outlaw, now hunted by the descendants of people Robin Hood killed, justified or not, and forced to kill them too.

That's the heart of it, Jackman said: the weight of guilt, violence, and pain, building to a story about redemption. The poster line "he was no hero" captures the appeal. Shot in Northern Ireland with much of the same crew and locations as Game of Thrones, the film has a mythic, extraordinary look, but its real subject is the stories we tell to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own lives, when everything is nuanced and nothing is black and white.

Rich pointed out it fits a pattern in Jackman's career, from a not-always-heroic P.T. Barnum to a demon-haunted Wolverine. Jackman explained why he's drawn to flipping characters on their heads: it feels human, and it makes him relate to them more. Everyone is doing their best while carrying a darker side alongside the light, and ignoring that part, he said, is something we do at our peril. The redemption, in the end, comes from taking accountability for who we are and what we do. As Jackman put it with a laugh, they were going deep.