Trivia: A star in his native Australia thanks to his work on television and in musical theatre, actor Hugh Jackman became known to American audiences through his role as Logan/Wolverine in Bryan Singer's lavish adaptation of the popular Marvel comic X-Men (2000). Born of English parentage in Sydney on October 12, 1968, Jackman was raised as the youngest of five children. After earning a communications degree as a journalism major from Sydney's University of Technology, he attended the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts, where he studied drama. The fledgling actor got his first big break immediately after graduation, when he was offered a starring role on the popular TV series Corelli; his casting proved to be doubly serendipitous, as it provided him with an introduction to his future wife, actress Deborra-Lee Furness, with whom he would have a son. Jackman starred in a number of other TV series -- and also began to earn recognition for his work on the stage in such productions as Beauty and the Beast, Sunset Boulevard, and Trevor Nunn's acclaimed Royal National Theatre production of Oklahoma!, the latter of which featured the actor in an Olivier-nominated performance as Curly McLain. In 1999, a year after being nominated for the Olivier, Jackman was again honored, this time with a Best Actor nomination from the Australian Film Institute for his portrayal of a man estranged from his brother in the urban drama Erskineville Kings. The actor's winning streak continued when he was hired to replace Dougray Scott as Wolverine in Bryan Singer's high-profile adaptation of X-Men. The film, whose cast also included Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, James Marsden, and Halle Berry, opened to strong reviews and box-office to become one of the biggest hits of the summer. Jackman's rising international popularity was reflected by his casting in Tony Goldwyn's Someone Like You, a romantic comedy also starring Ashley Judd and Greg Kinnear. Jackman was hard to ignore in 2001, appearing just a few short months later in John Travolta's latest comback, Swordfish.2003 saw the return of the X-Men and, with them, Jackman's Wolverine in X2: X-Men United, a film that not only repeated the first film's financial success, but was considered by many to be the rare sequel that outdoes its predecessor. Sticking with the action genre, Jackman could next be seen in the title role of the 2004 ultra-big-budget film Van Helsing. Although Van Helsing was met with critical disdain, and underperformed at the box office, Jackman rebounded by earning rave reviews as the lead in the Broadway musical The Boy From Oz. That same year he hosted the annual Tony awards, again to great acclaim.Fans had numerous opportunities to see Jackman on the big screen in 2006. He took a humorous turn that summer as a possible serial killer in Woody Allen's comedy Scoop, and in fall he starred opposite Oscar winner Rachel Weisz in the stylish The Fountain as a man who searches through three different time periods concurrently, on a single spiritual journey. That same autumn, Jackman could also be seen in the dark fantasy The Prestige, playing a turn of the century magician who some speculate performs real magic, and before winter, audiences were hearing his vocal work in a pair of animated films, Flushed Away and Happy Feet. 2006 also proved to be the year Jackman announced he would produce and star in a big-screen adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.Jackman would spend the following years appearing in numerous films, like X-Men: First Class, Butter, and Real Steel. He would enjoy one of his biggest successes playing Jean Valjean in Tom Hooper's adaptation of the stage musical Les Miserables, a role that earned Jackman a Best Actor nomination from the Academy, his first Oscar nod.

Trivia: Began his film career at age 5. Toured with the Royal Shakespeare Company in a 1999 production of King Lear, with Nigel Hawthorne playing the title role. Won a Japanese Academy Award for his work in The Twilight Samurai (2002). Received an honorary MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 2002. Has a black belt in karate.

Trivia: Born on the Japanese island of Okinawa, Brian Tee moved with his parents to the U.S. at the age of two. After growing up in the sunny suburbs of L.A., he graduated high school and enrolled at Cal State Fullerton with a major in pre-law. In an effort to remain connected to the arts, he took an acting for non-majors class and discovered a deep love of performance. Causing something of a family upset, he dropped out of Cal State and enrolled in the Dramatic Arts Acting program at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating, he began auditioning, landing appearances on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Pretender. In 2006 he scored a role as the Drift King in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift before signing on for Nanking, Bill Guttentag's documentary about the 1937 massacre of the Chinese city.

Trivia: Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee began training for a career in action movies almost from birth. His father is a Taekwondo grandmaster, and Lee attended UCLA on an athletic scholarship for the school's Taekwondo team. He began his acting career with projects like the family comedy What's Cooking?, the Asian-American drama Face, and the TNT fantasy-action series Witchblade. Then in 2002, he was named as one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People, making him a more familiar face and landing him more high-profile jobs, like Die Another Day, Torque, and Elektra. In 2006, he appeared in the documentary The Slanted Screen, discussing the history of how Asians and Asian Americans have been portrayed in film. That same year, he signed on to the cast of the show Thief, followed by a remake of The Bionic Woman in 2007. Also that year, Lee was named by People as one of the "Sexiest Men Alive." In the years to come, Lee would appear in several films, like the Total Recall and Red Dawn remakes, as well as on the remake of Hawaii Five-0.

Trivia: A former model, Dutch-born actress Famke Janssen had her screen breakthrough as Xenia Onatopp, James Bond's (literally) man-crushing foe in GoldenEye (1995). After earning fame and a certain dose of coy notoriety for her portrayal of the character, who was endowed with the unique ability to squash potential seducers to death between her thighs, Janssen went on to prove that she was more than just the latest variety of Bond babe.Born in Holland on January 1, 1964, Janssen launched her lucrative modeling career at an early age. Moving to New York when she was barely out of her teens, she soon tired of the vacuous nature of modeling and enrolled at Columbia University, where she studied literature and creative writing. Janssen made her screen debut in the 1992 drama Fathers and Sons. Following the success of GoldenEye, the actress began finding steady screen work, appearing in such films as Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man (1998), in which she played Kenneth Branagh's ex-wife; Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998), which cast her as Branagh's girlfriend; and Robert Rodriguez's The Faculty, in which Janssen's part was furthered by alien brainwashing, instead of Branagh.After closing the century with another excursion into supernatural grotesqueries in the remake of The House on Haunted Hill (1999), Janssen began the 21st century on a somewhat more heroic note, playing one of the titular group of superheroes in Bryan Singer's adaptation of the popular comic book X-Men.

Trivia: Worked as a model in her late teens. Became the face of Sportsgirl in 2009. Graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts Youth Programme. Trained for two years at Sydney's Actors Centre Australia, studying theatre. Played two different characters in Home and Away, in 2009 and 2014.

Trivia: A director known for making sophisticated dramas that chronicle people's emotional and moral struggles in the face of an often hostile outside world, James Mangold first earned acclaim for Heavy, his 1995 film debut. The poignant and often wordless account of an overweight pizza chef's (Pruitt Taylor Vince) unrequited longing for a young waitress (Liv Tyler), the film was a success among critics and art house audiences, winning the Grand Jury Prize for Best Director at the 1995 Sundance Festival.Raised in New York's Hudson Valley (where he would later film Heavy), Mangold, the son of minimalist painter Robert Mangold, attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied film and acting. He broke into the film business at the tender age of 21 as the recipient of a prestigious writer/director deal with Disney. However, he was eventually dropped by the studio for, in his words, refusing to play Hollywood's "very elaborate chess game." Mangold subsequently supported himself through a series of odd jobs and endured a phase of unemployment. He eventually decided to go to Columbia University's film school, where he began working on Heavy under the guidance of director Milos Forman. Inspired in part by the upstate New York town where he was raised and in part by a very overweight friend he once had, Mangold set out, in his words, "to make a film about a large man who's invisible." With a cast that, in addition to Vince and relative newcomer Tyler, included Debbie Harry and Shelly Winters, Heavy evolved into a beautifully-stylized film full of richly somber moments and almost poetic silences.Following the critical success of Heavy, Mangold embarked on a project that appeared to be an ostensible departure from his first. Cop Land (1997), which Mangold wrote while making Heavy, was a cop drama set in a New Jersey town populated largely by commuting members of the NYPD. Although much of the film focused on police corruption, its central character, the town's half-deaf sheriff (Sylvester Stallone, who gained 38 pounds for the role), was similar to Heavy's protagonist in his inability to fit in with his peers and his desire to get what he cannot have, in this case, work in the city. Starring Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Janeane Garofalo (all of whom worked for scale pay instead of their usual salaries), Cop Land was accepted into the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival and premiered in the U.S. to strong reviews. Continuing his tradition of documenting the inner struggles of conflicted individuals, Mangold next set about adapting Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted for the screen. Kaysen's powerful memoir of the 18 months she spent in an exclusive mental hospital during the late 1960s, its fragmented, episodic narrative proved a challenge to adapt, and the finished product led many critics to comment that it was a challenge to which Mangold had failed to rise. However, the film proved to be a showcase for some of the most talented actresses of the day, including Winona Ryder, Brittany Murphy, and Angelina Jolie, who won a Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe, Oscar, and Screen Actors Guild Award for her portrayal of Lisa, the charming sociopath who befriends Ryder's protagonist. Mangold next set to work on the time-traveling romantic comedy Kate & Leopold, starring Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman. The film received a luke-warm response, not to mention an embarrassing last-minute re-edit to correct a plot point that would make Meg Ryan's character her own ex-boyfriend's great great great grandmother. Mangold would quickly put these tousles with mediocrity behind him, however, with 2005's acclaimed biopic Walk the Line.Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon starred in this tremendously successful film as legendary country music couple Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. A long project in the making, Cash reportedly chose Phoenix for the part before his death in 2003. Both leads performed their own vocals for the movie, as well as learning the guitar and autoharp, respectively, and took home Golden Globes for their performances. The film itself was also honored with the award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy at the event, a tremendous success for Mangold. Over the next several years, the filmmaker would direct the critically acclaimed western 3:10 to Yuma, the superhero spin-off The Wolverine, and the TV series Men in Trees.