My favorite play in drama school was ’The Bacchae.’ It’s about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy - it’s related to the word ’bacchanal’ - and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.

Jackman recalls a formative encounter with Euripides’ tragedy as a student: not because it is “respectable” classical fare, but because it stages the collapse of social order under ecstatic, Dionysian force. His emphasis on the king being “eaten alive” by women in an orgiastic frenzy points to the play’s central conflict between rigid authority and unruly desire. Read autobiographically, the remark suggests an actor’s attraction to material that permits extremity—physicality, trance, and loss of control—qualities that can be thrilling in performance and that challenge the disciplined norms of training. More broadly, he frames “animalistic chaos” as a kind of truth-telling energy: the dangerous, liberating pull of instinct when repression breaks.