Hugh Jackman Can't Wait To Get Back In The Saddle For Western Adventure

Hugh Jackman has signed on to star in Madeleine Stowe's directorial debut because he's keen to saddle up and play an all-American cowboy.

The movie star studied horseback riding for his roles in Kate & Leopold and Australia but now he's planning to get serious for The Last of the Mohicans star's new project Unbound Captives.

Jackman will play a frontiersman who comes to the aid of a woman kidnapped by the Comanche Indians, who kill her husband. Rachel Weisz is in talks for the female lead in the film, which Stowe has also co-written with her husband Brian Benben.

Jackman tells Cowboys & Indians magazine that his 13-year-old son can't wait for filming to start: "He knows all about this project and keeps asking me, 'When are we going to go and live with the American Indians?' He knows all the nuances - who the tribes are and where they lived. It's fascinating to me."

And the actor admits he has a very personal reason to get back on a horse, adding, "When you come to riding as an adult as I did... I really learned how to work with a horse in my 30s and was much more cautious than if I'd ridden as a boy or young man.

"But when you ride cutting horses every day for months, like I did in Australia, even falling off a few of them, I discovered that I genuinely loved being on a horse and now have to find a reason to get back out to the West and ride again."