Taris Tyler, Hugh Jackman's body double photographed in Los Angeles for The Sunday Age on February 20, 2013.

Taris Tyler believes he's blessed to have a strong personal and professional relationship with Hugh Jackman, but he wants to develop his own acting as well. Photo: Michelle Day

ON A film set in Atlanta two weeks ago, Hugh Jackman was at the charismatic, compelling peak of his screen powers - a best-actor nominee at work, nailing a scene with such conviction onlookers were stunned by his intensity. When the scene was done, Jackman was excited, too. He was thinking about the Oscars.

Taris Tyler - like Jackman, an Australian actor who traces his Hollywood dreams to formative years in Perth - had been watching Jackman work, as he has done many times before, but he had never seen his friend scorch his way through a script as powerfully as he'd done that day.

''He'd just done this incredible scene,'' Tyler recalls of the moment on the set of the movie Jackman is currently filming, Prisoners.

''I'd never seen him act like that before, and people on set were just speechless at how good he was. I was already emotional after watching that scene play out, and as he came off I went up to him to tell him how good it was. But he was more excited with what he had to tell me.

''He said, 'Did you get the email?' I said, 'No.' And Hugh said: 'You're going to the Oscars!' ''

And just like that, Hollywood's most exclusive golden door swung open.

An invitation to the Oscars? ''Beyond anything I ever imagined,'' says Tyler, a journeyman actor who not so many years ago wondered if this sometimes bruising show business life was really worth the ego-sapping effort.

Now, as he prepares to walk the red carpet at Sunday night's Academy Awards, he has his answer. He's on the inside of the Dream Factory, unknown, unheralded and with an unlikely story that suggests the best Hollywood tales don't always belong to the household names.

You may not have heard of Taris Tyler, but there's every chance you've seen him. If you've seen Les Miserables - the epic musical for which Jackman, 44, scored his best-actor nod - you've seen him. If you've seen Baz Luhrmann's Australia, you've seen him. The Wolverine movies? He's there, too.

Off-screen, Tyler, 40, is a Jackman intimate. He sometimes refers to the star as ''my brother''. And on-screen, he is something else again - Tyler is the star's body double and stand-in, and has spent most of the past six years with one of Hollywood's oddest job descriptions: he spends a lot of his working life being Hugh Jackman.

Strange? It can be. And Tyler admits it's not where he thought he'd find himself after years of trying to crack it as an actor. ''I never thought I was going to end up a body double,'' he says, laughing at this unlikely career twist in his mid-30s. ''But I'm bloody glad I have.''

He's used to the inevitable questions. Does he do Jackman's nude scenes? (No.) Does he earn a lot of money? (''You can earn a very good living.'' See breakout) Is Hugh Jackman really the nicest man in Hollywood? (Yes.)

And this one: What's it like living in Hugh Jackman's shadow?

''And my answer every time is, 'I am not in that man's shadow, I'm in his direct light'. He doesn't leave anybody out. If he can help someone he will. I guess he's taken me under his wing more than anybody else in terms of helping them achieve their dream.''

Tyler understands the curiosity, and that his is hardly a normal job even by show business standards. The Hollywood machine doesn't talk much about these kinds of jobs - the jobs done by the people who help make the world go round for the studios and for their names-in-lights superstars.

For an actor of Jackman's stature, being Hugh Jackman, superstar, is a big and complicated business, especially when balanced with his desire to continue being Hugh Jackman, ordinary bloke and family man. Jackman has no entourage to speak of, but there is a small, carefully chosen group of people that helps make a hectic Hollywood life run smoothly. There is an assistant, who is an old family friend; a personal trainer; and on-set, the alter-ego - the body double, a crucial player in the day-to-day world of making movies.

Six years ago, Jackman found a double he decided he wanted to have working with him wherever his travels took him. It was his first film with Tyler as his stand-in - Luhrmann's Australia - and the actor was impressed. One day during shooting in Darwin, sitting in the make-up room, Jackman made his pitch, as Tyler recalls it: ''I want to know if you want to make movies with me. I'm doing a little film after this called Wolverine. We're going to have a beard on our faces for the next year. So if you can stand looking like an idiot with mutton chops for three months, would you like to come and do it with me?''

''Of course, I had to think about it for all of one second,'' Tyler says.

At that point, he could scarcely believe his luck at scoring the Luhrmann gig. It had been a typically nerve-racking actor's experience, beginning with a cattle call in Sydney. ''I went in and I told them I could ride horses and that's what they were looking for. I said, 'I'll do anything to be on this production.' They said, 'No problem, you and a thousand others.'

''Basically it was a cattle call; there were a thousand people there. You would get your photo taken, then hand over your CV and your headshot, they took your measurements, and that was it.''

Months passed. Tyler was visiting his family in Perth when his agent called, saying Luhrmann's people wanted to see him again - not for a role, but for the Jackman stand-in job.

''There were six or seven other guys there that they wanted to test. None of them looked like Hugh at all, but I thought maybe that's not what they care about, maybe it's more his height, or his build? I'm six-foot-one, he's six-foot-three. So I thought, this is going to be the only thing that doesn't work in my favour.

''As [the casting director] put me up against the wall with the tape measure she turned her back, and as she did that I pushed myself up just ever so slightly on my tippy-toes, just to bring up the height a little. I was hoping she wouldn't look down at my feet.

''She took the shot and I walked away from that wall so quickly she didn't notice.''

Two days later, he got another call back. Then three days later, another one - the workaday actor's humbling, frustrating lot.

Tyler recalls: ''I said to one of the PAs … you need to go in there and find out if I've got this job or not because I haven't eaten, I can't sleep, my nerves are shot. And he said, wait here. It was the longest four or five minutes of my life. And then Baz Luhrmann burst out through the studio doors, put his hands out, and he said: 'Welcome to the BazMark family, Taris Tyler. You are Hugh Jackman's stand-in and we can't wait to start working with you.' ''

He'd been on the sets of TV soaps and commercials before, but the Luhrmann experience - working on a $100 million Hollywood blockbuster - was a whole other world.

And as stand-in for the leading man, the demands on Tyler, and on Nicole Kidman's stand-in Alexis Lever, were significant. Stand-ins are not there to cover for a star who doesn't want to come out of his trailer. They are the actors who directors use to map out every scene - the lighting, the camera angles, the movement - before they bring in the stars to shoot the scene proper.

''I would go out and light the scenes for him, do the dialogue for the timing of the scenes … it was just a really great time, and I was learning so much, how lighting works, working with the director of photography, learning about focus points,'' Tyler says.

''I just focused on doing the best job I could to make Hugh's job easier, so he could come in and watch what I'd done on screen and watch how the scene's going to play out. When they're happy with how that scene is going to play out, they bring the actors on. Hugh would pretty much watch what I'd done and I'd walk him through it, make sure he knew which key lights were going to hit him and when.''

Jackman was impressed on a professional level, and over the course of that long and arduous shoot, which took the Luhrmann circus from one side of Australia to the other over many months, the two actors began to build the personal bond that has kept them close on set and off ever since. They've worked together in Sydney, Tokyo, London and Paris. Tyler says Jackman and his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, have made him part of their family.

And crucially, he says, the star has never lost sight of the fact that Tyler is an actor with his own career ambitions. Jackman may not have endured the battles and frustrations that mark the careers of most actors, but Tyler has, and Jackman knows it.

'I've lived off two-minute noodles,'' Tyler says. ''Sometimes I've had nothing in the cupboard. I've worked in bars. I've done whatever I needed to do to survive. But I didn't want anyone's help. I never thought about giving up, but the doubts were there. Thinking, maybe this isn't going to happen.''

By the standards of most young actors - who are lucky to ever earn a buck - he'd had a good run, including a long stint as a ''featured extra'' on the Seven medical drama All Saints. He didn't have any lines, but he had regular acting work for three years on a high-profile production.

After a while, even that started to wear thin. Then the Jackman job happened, perhaps just in time. After wrapping Australia in 2007, they shot Wolverine in Sydney and New Zealand. In 2009, Jackman took a year off from movies - hosting the Oscars, doing a Broadway play.

''He said to me, 'I'm going to be having a year off, there won't be a lot to do because I'm not doing any films. But I want you to take the time to go back into acting, keep your craft going, do whatever it is you need to keep it going. Do some short films, whatever.' And it wasn't long after that that a short film did come my way and it was being shot in Perth. He said, 'Definitely do it.' ''

That film, Disarm, has played to acclaim on the international film circuit. When Tyler next worked with Jackman, on the Spielberg-produced sci-fi thriller Real Steal, director Shawn Levy asked for a copy of Disarm. Impressed with what he saw, he slotted Tyler into a small speaking role in Real Steal and also arranged a meeting with the powerhouse William Morris agency in Los Angeles.

''I went to Hollywood, had my meeting with William Morris, and then I went to Hollywood Boulevard. I bought some chalk, and I went up to Hugh Jackman's hand and footprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I drew my handprint in chalk, signed my name, and I said to myself, 'Within five years I'm going to the Oscars.' ''

Two years on, that dream is coming true, on the night that Jackman stands in line for the highest acting honour. Tyler went through the marathon Les Miserables shoot with him, the most recent of the Hollywood experiences that regularly have him pinching himself.

''They all knew they were on to something special making that movie. Russell [Crowe] would have these gatherings at his house after work and on the weekend, and there'd be Anne Hathaway and Amanda Seyfried and Hugh, all singing around the piano until 3.30 in the morning some nights. They were all so close, they all loved to sing, they all loved to perform.''

In Los Angeles at the Oscars (12.30pm Monday in Melbourne and Sydney), the cast of Les Mis will perform again. To you and me, they will be stars on the grandest stage, but Tyler will be in the audience seeing nerve-racked friends performing to a massive global audience, a long way from those private singalongs around Russell Crowe's piano during filming.

Afterwards, he will join Jackman at the Governor's Ball - the Academy's official post-ceremony function for winners and nominees. By the time they get to the ball, Tyler hopes his mate is clutching one of those little gold statues - but whether Jackman wins or loses, it will make no difference to their relationship, which is cemented by a handshake.

''I'd never really expected to keep going on to each film with him, but he keeps offering it to me each time,'' Tyler says.

''I don't expect anything from him, and he doesn't expect anything either. I think our deal works because he encourages me to become the actor I've always wanted to become, and he has seen what I'm capable of doing, and he believes in me and expects me to continue to do that. We've talked about it, and he's said if a role was to come my way halfway through a film I'm working on with him, I must take that role.''

But those career concerns can wait. For the next two days, Tyler is happy to sit back and watch Jackman bask in the glory. And if the boy from Oz wins, he declares: ''I'll be the happiest stand-in in the world.''

An A-list job that has its own perks

AS TARIS Tyler says of his job as a full-time body double and stand-in: ''There's not very many of us in the world.''

It's a Hollywood role attached mainly to A-list stars - the heavyweights whose financial clout, the big budgets of their movies, and the demands of their schedules, make it a necessity. And for the stand-in themselves, the pay and the perks can be impressive.

As Hugh Jackman's stand-in since 2007, Taris Tyler typically has his own trailer on set, flies first-class, and has accommodation, transport and most of his meals provided by the production. ''You can do pretty well if you work hard and often,'' he says.

The flipside: long, long days on set, and when the movie wraps, the perks and the pay cheques stop until the next one.

Tyler isn't one to brag, and nor is Jackman, who Tyler confirms is regarded as one of the least demanding stars in the business. ''He's the absolute real deal.''

His most memorable proof of that brings him to tears recalling it. When Tyler's grandmother was dying in 2008, Jackman arranged for the actor to leave the Wolverine set in New Zealand and fly home to say goodbye. ''He said, 'This is just a movie, and that is real life, and you must go home now'. He made it happen. I'm forever grateful for that.''

The depth of the bond is clear even in Tyler's sharing of his story with Fairfax Media: while stars like to keep the spotlight for themselves, Jackman gave his blessing to this interview. And then there's this. Tyler reckons Jackman has made a promise. ''When I make my first feature film as an actor in my own right he says he will be my stand-in on my first day on set.''