Hugh Jackman explores the dark side in Prisoners

Hugh Jackman knows how to please an audience. While facing journalists at a press conference for his new thriller, Prisoners, at the Zurich Film Festival recently, he declared that without Switzerland, "I literally wouldn't be here. My parents met at Interlaken. My father was a ski and dance instructor, and completely swept my mother off her 19-year-old feet."

He wasn't actually conceived there - that happened after his English parents emigrated to Australia as "£10 Poms" - but he still thanked the country for his existence. The next night, the love-in continued when the festival presented him with a lifetime achievement award.

When we meet at Zurich's swanky Baur au Lac Hotel, Jackman lives up to his reputation as one of the nicest, most down-to-earth men in show business. He may be a Hollywood A-lister, but his feet are still planted firmly on the ground. No actor can complain about being liked, but Jackman feels his genial nature, along with his recurring role as the clawed mutant Wolverine, has led to audiences forming a limited impression of his acting.

"They forget that I did a play, or don't know that I did a play [A Steady Rain] with Daniel Craig, or that I spent a year doing a musical playing Peter Allen, who was very gay and flamboyant, or Oklahoma!, or Gaston in Beauty and the Beast," he says.

But if his Oscar-nominated performance as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables last year, didn't change these cinema-goers' ideas about the 45-year-old actor's versatility, then his portrayal of Keller Dover in Prisoners will. Dover is a religious survivalist who takes the law violently into his own hands when his daughter is abducted.