Hugh Jackman told Ball State University graduates on Saturday that failure is not a detour from success but the route to it. The 57-year-old actor said, “you’re going to fail, and you’re going to fail often, and that’s the best track for success.”
Jackman, an Oscar-nominated actor, well-regarded theater performer and social do-gooder who was the fifth highest-paid actor of 2024, used the commencement address to turn his own career into the lesson. “My life has not gone the way I thought it would,” he said, adding that “a lot of the best things that have ever happened to me have been mistakes or failures or random classes I joined to get me across the finish line.”
He knows something about plans going sideways. Jackman studied communications and majored in journalism at the University of Technology Sydney, where he said he was doing “the bare minimum” to get his bachelor’s degree. He needed one more elective course to graduate, so he took theater appreciation after a friend recommended the “easiest” option. He did not show up for the first three weeks.
That class changed everything. Jackman was randomly assigned to play the lead in the class play, and later realized acting was his true calling while touring the production at a local university. He went on to audition for a one-year acting course at Actor Centre Australia in Sydney and earned a place in the 20-person cohort.
Even that step nearly ended before it started. The program required a $3,500 check, and Jackman threw the acceptance letter in the trash when he could not afford it. The next day, he received a $3,500 check from his grandmother’s will in the mail, found the letter, and decided to attend.
That story fits the larger arc of his life better than any clean success narrative. Jackman told the graduates, “I could cherry pick some stories that illustrate that with strong goal setting, hard work, and just a touch of luck, you too will reach the top. But I’m here to tell you that life just doesn’t work out like that.” He added, “Well, certainly not for me. For most of my life, I just didn’t know…And I don’t mean [at] 22 or 27, I mean six months ago.”
The message landed because it came from someone who reached the top, and never by the straight line people like to imagine. The better answer to the day’s question is in his own words: success, for Hugh Jackman, has come through mistakes, failures and the occasional random class that turned out to matter more than the degree.