Hugh Jackman praises having psychiatrists on his movie set

Hugh Jackman says having on-set psychiatrists available during the filming of his upcoming mental-health family drama "The Son" was a new and, he discovered, welcome experience.

"This was the first time I'd ever seen such a thing on a film," the actor 54, told the U.K. television network the BBC, "and people used it and it was necessary."

Directed by Florian Zeller ("The Father"), based on his own play, the movie centers on teenager Nicholas Miller (Zen McGrath), who suffers from depression and has begun self-harming and skipping school. His parents, well-to-do divorced New Yorkers Peter (Jackman) and Kate (Laura Dern), determine after a mental-health emergency that Nicholas will live with his father and his father's new family. (The movie, which had a limited release in late November, opens wide on Jan. 20.)

Tony Award-winner Jackman, best known for playing the savage superhero Wolverine in a series of X-Men movies, conceded, "There's a little part of the old-school part of my brain [that thinks], 'Well, that's up to you to work out.' If you need to go to a doctor, for whatever reason, your foot, your mental health, you know, you work that out. But," he added, "I think it certainly would be a sign from an employer that ... [they] understand taking care of the whole person, not just paying them, but taking care of their well-being in all forms is really, really important."

Jackman said he faced his own mental-health issues during filming, when his father, accountant Christopher John Jackman, died while the movie was in production. The star took no time off. "My father actually never missed a day of work in his life," Jackman said. "I did imagine what my father would say and he would say, 'Go to work'."

Pushing himself to do so led to sleepless nights, and his subsequently seeing a therapist. "I would be one of the least [likely] people I know who I'd describe as a hot mess, but I certainly was during this."

When the film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in September, Jackman said at a news conference that, “The movie really does see how isolated, particularly on mental health issues, people get. There is a shame, there is a guilt, there is an intense desire to fix things."

He told the BBC, "There is a real lack of knowledge and ignorance and shame around the subject and I think it's something we need to confront, really, really quickly."