Several years before he achieved worldwide fame playing Wolverine in the X-Men movies, Hugh Jackman was performing in various Australian theatre shows. That included playing Gaston in the country’s original stage production of Beauty and the Beast in 1995, adapted from the same-named critically-acclaimed movie released four years prior during the Disney Renaissance era. Unfortunately for Jackman, during one of those performances, he ended up peeing his pants in the middle of playing the chauvinistic villain, and most of it ended up in his boots.
Hugh Jackman talked about this embarrassing moment when The Howard Stern Show’s title host brought it up in their interview that’s part of the actor’s press tour for his 2025 movie release, Song Sung Blue. But as Jackman explained, this came as a result of heeding advice a doctor gave to him:
I was getting a lot of headaches and I went to a naturopath and the guy said ‘You’re dehydrated. You’ve got to drink a lot of water. Drink it before 5:00, like two liters of water.’ So that first day, I drank two gallons, and you can see what’s happening.
Oh yeah, we can all see what’s happening at this point. Drinking that much water throughout the day would make anyone want to pee badly, but most of us wouldn’t be in Hugh Jackman’s position of needing to perform in a stage show that evening. But it wasn’t just the tight pants that caused the eventual spillage, as he continued:
The first song I sing, ‘You’ve been dreaming just one dream.’ It was so hard to get through, I had to pick her up. I had to drag her around, I had to sing. And as I picked Belle up, a little bit of piss came out. And I’m wearing red tights, Gaston.
Talk about seeing disaster coming from a mile away. Dealing with arguably one of the worst-case scenarios for performing in front of a large crowd (in this case, 1500 people), Hugh Jackman was faced with needing to pick between two terrible options. He recalled:
And then I thought ‘Uh-oh.’ And I remember Belle’s over my shoulder and goes ‘What’s going on?’ because I’d stopped singing. I was just marching around. And that at the end of the song, I had a choice. You sing that F sharp. I either sing it and piss my pants, or I don’t sing it and humiliate myself. So I sang it, and it was just going.
Hugh Jackman concluded by sharing how rather than immediately taking his bow at the applause for him after he was done singing, he turned upstage, looked down and didn’t notice any urine soakage. So he laughed and thought his boots were “filled with piss,” but by the time he made it backstage and over to his dresser three minutes after the song, his crotch was “completely wet.” I guess we can say that no one pees like Gaston.
If there was anything good that came from this experience, besides how it sounds like no one in the audience noticed his piss-covered tights, it’s that Hugh Jackman realized “nothing can embarrass you after that.” I also imagine that he planned his bathroom breaks better after this incident, making sure he peed right before going on stage. It makes me wonder if he had any other close calls like this, like when he was performing with his now-official girlfriend Sutton Foster in The Music Man.
You can see Hugh Jackman starring with his Golden Globe-nominated costar Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue starting December 25. He’ll then return to the big screen for The Sheep Detective, which opens May 8 on the 2026 movies schedule, and it’s also rumored that he has more Wolverine appearances lined up for the MCU.
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