Most first reactions get lost. You read something, have a dozen thoughts, and by the time you sit down to respond, you've kept the two that sounded sensible and forgotten the rest.
Hugh Jackman described doing the opposite. This piece starts with his account, and the account of the people who received his message. The birth charts come later, and only as a separate layer of symbolism.
The voice note, as they tell it
In an interview published by Variety on July 10, 2024, Rebecca Rubin spoke with Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman and director Shawn Levy about Deadpool & Wolverine.
Levy said they had spent months trying to find the story without it coming together, and that once Jackman joined, they knew within a day what the film was. Reynolds summed it up: "We had a why."
Then Reynolds brought up the voice memo. After reading the script, Jackman had sent them a voice note. Reynolds first called it ten minutes long; Levy corrected him and said it was more like seventeen. Both joked about how alarming it is to receive a message that long.
According to Reynolds, Jackman was feeling his way toward something he couldn't yet name, and the memo then set off one idea after another. Reynolds said one of his favourite parts of Jackman's character in the film came from that voice note.
Jackman's version is less flattering to himself. He said he remembered sending it and was embarrassed by it; he called it inarticulate and recalled admitting, mid-message, that he was repeating himself. He explained why he did it that way. An acting teacher had told him to write down everything he thinks the first time he reads a play or script, because "you never have those eyes again". So he read the script and recorded his reactions straight away. He chose a voice note rather than a phone call because he wanted his uninterrupted stream of thought, without questions. In his own estimate, most of the seventeen minutes was unusable, and perhaps a minute of it ended up being useful.
That is their account, given while promoting the film. It isn't an independent record of how the script changed, and this article doesn't try to measure how much of the film came from the memo.
Capture first, polish later
What makes the story useful isn't the length of the message. It's the order of operations.
- Capture happened before judgement. Jackman recorded his reactions immediately, before he had time to decide which ones were worth saying.
- The format protected the flow. A recording with no one on the other end meant no interruptions and no need to defend a half-formed point.
- Selection happened afterwards, by someone else. By his own estimate most of it wasn't useful. Reynolds and Levy found the part that was.
- The first read can't be repeated. That's the teacher's point: once you know how a story ends, you can't read it as a newcomer again.
None of that is a rule for every project. It's one working habit, described by the people involved, for one script.
The birth charts, kept separate
Neither man has a usable recorded birth time, so this section uses only placements that hold across their whole local birth days. That means no Rising signs, no houses and no exact Moon positions. Astrology here is a symbolic vocabulary. It isn't the source of the voice-note habit, and it doesn't explain why the collaboration worked.
Hugh Jackman, born October 12, 1968, in Sydney, has the Sun in Libra and Mercury in Libra, with Mercury retrograde on his birth day. The Moon was in Gemini for the whole day. In astrological tradition, Mercury is the planet of language and ideas, and a retrograde Mercury is often read as attention that returns to first thoughts and works them over again.
Ryan Reynolds, born October 23, 1976, in Vancouver, also has Mercury in Libra. His Sun is a borderline case. By Lunara's calculation it entered Scorpio only a minute or two before his Vancouver birth day began, so it stays in Scorpio all day, but only just. Because it sits so close to the Libra–Scorpio boundary, this article doesn't lean on his Sun sign. His Moon was in Scorpio all day.
The shared detail is Libra. Both Mercurys are in it, and Jackman's Libra Sun sits close to Reynolds's Libra Mercury across every sampled time of both birth days. Libra is traditionally associated with weighing one view against another and with thinking in conversation. That's an image to reflect on, not evidence about how they work together, and it says nothing about their friendship.
Their full date-only profiles are at Hugh Jackman's natal chart and Ryan Reynolds's natal chart.
Try it: a private first-reaction capture
This exercise is ours, not Jackman's method. Use it on your own work: a draft you're writing, a plan you've been sent to review, or anything you're allowed to think about freely. Don't record material you aren't permitted to keep, and keep the recording to yourself.
1. Capture, once. The first time you read the draft, set a timer for five minutes. Talk into a voice memo, or type without stopping. Say what you noticed, what confused you, what you liked and what you want to change. Don't fix anything yet.
2. Wait. Leave it for a few hours or until the next day.
3. Select one line. Listen back or reread. Pick the single reaction most likely to make the next draft better. Write it down in one sentence.
4. Decide what to refine. Turn that sentence into one concrete change: a scene to cut, a point to move earlier, a question to answer. Ignore the rest for now.
Most of what you capture won't be useful, and that's expected. The point is that the useful line was recorded before you had a chance to talk yourself out of it.
Explore further
To see your own chart, you can calculate your free birth chart and look up your Mercury sign; add a birth time and city only if you know them.
If you'd like to see how a written natal reading handles placements like these, start with the sample natal reading, which uses fictional birth details. If you want your own, there's an optional paid personal birth chart reading. It's an automated, written interpretation of your own chart, not a reading made for these actors, and it can't assess acting talent, collaboration, friendship or finances. What's included and the price are shown before you buy.
Text written with AI assistance. Interview material is quoted and paraphrased from Variety (July 10, 2024). The positions are calculated, not estimated.