In 2006, moviegoers could see Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman together twice within the space of just a few months.

First came Woody Allen’s Scoop, a playful murder mystery in which Johansson’s aspiring journalist becomes romantically involved with Jackman’s suspiciously charming aristocrat. Then came Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, where the same two actors stepped into a far darker world of obsession, betrayal and rival stage magicians. Scoop opened in the United States on July 28, while The Prestige followed on October 20.

Watching those movies back-to-back, audiences might reasonably assume the pair spent their downtime talking about acting, movie stars or perhaps the strange coincidence that both films involved magic.

What Johansson later revealed was much more unexpected.

During their time working together on Scoop, she and Jackman discovered they shared a serious love of musical theater. Before cameras were rolling, the two movie stars could be found in the hair-and-makeup trailer singing Broadway classics together.

And they apparently did plenty of it.

Two Stars, Two Movies, and a Very Strange Coincidence

Technically, Johansson and Jackman’s unusual run began before 2006.

Scoop was filmed in London during the summer of 2005 before reaching American theaters the following year. The movie reunited Johansson with Woody Allen after Match Point, but this time she was playing comedy rather than the intensely dramatic role she had taken on in their previous collaboration.

Johansson played Sondra Pransky, an American journalism student who receives information from the ghost of a deceased reporter about a possible killer. Her investigation leads to wealthy British aristocrat Peter Lyman, played by Jackman.

There is just one problem: while trying to determine whether Peter is dangerous, Sondra becomes increasingly attracted to him.

The chemistry was not especially difficult to manufacture, at least according to Johansson. While promoting Scoop in 2006, she joked that Jackman was so charming and handsome that playing a woman dazzled by him did not require an enormous leap of imagination.

But something else was happening away from the cameras.

Years later, Johansson recalled discovering that she and Jackman were both passionate musical-theater fans.

She told BroadwayWorld that she had grown up loving composers including Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter and George Gershwin, and said that wanting to perform in musicals had been one of the reasons she started acting in the first place.

Jackman, of course, was the perfect colleague for that particular obsession.

So their mornings took an unusual turn.

Johansson remembered the pair spending time in the hair-and-makeup trailer singing songs from shows including Carousel, Oklahoma! and Damn Yankees.

Instead of quietly preparing for scenes involving suspicion, romance and murder, two of Hollywood’s biggest stars were essentially turning their trailer into an unofficial Broadway rehearsal room.

Hugh Jackman Was Already Much More Than Wolverine

For anyone who primarily knew Jackman from the X-Men movies, the story might have sounded surprising.

For theater audiences, it made perfect sense.

By the time he worked with Johansson, Jackman had already established himself as a major musical performer. His Broadway debut in The Boy from Oz, playing Australian entertainer Peter Allen, earned him the 2004 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He also hosted that year’s Tony Awards ceremony, singing and dancing during the broadcast while simultaneously competing for — and ultimately winning — one of the night’s biggest acting prizes.

Johansson clearly admired that range.

She later affectionately described Jackman as someone people called the “Mayor of Hollywood,” praising his ability to sing, dance and act. She also called him the “bee’s knees.”

Their shared interest gave the partnership an easy connection that had little to do with the characters they were playing.

And before long, they were working together again.

Then The Prestige Changed Everything

If Scoop was breezy and comic, The Prestige could hardly have been more different.

Christopher Nolan’s film placed Jackman opposite Christian Bale as Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, two magicians whose professional competition becomes a destructive personal obsession.

Johansson played Olivia Wenscombe, a stage assistant whose loyalties become tangled in the rivalry.

The film demanded an entirely different atmosphere from Scoop. Secrets, deception and sacrifice drive the story, and virtually every major relationship is affected by the magicians’ escalating need to defeat one another.

Johansson described Nolan during a 2006 interview as intensely focused and deeply involved in every aspect of filmmaking, while emphasizing how much she enjoyed working with him. She also noted how different her relationship with Jackman’s character was compared with their romance in Scoop: Angier was obsessive and consumed by his goals rather than the polished aristocrat audiences had seen Jackman play earlier that year.

The contrast is striking.

Within one year, audiences saw Johansson falling for Jackman while investigating whether he was a killer, then saw her caught inside his character’s increasingly dangerous war with another magician.

Behind the scenes, however, their previous collaboration meant they were no longer strangers thrown together for a major production.

They had already spent mornings singing show tunes.

A Small Story That Explains Their Chemistry

Hollywood behind-the-scenes stories often involve elaborate stunts, arguments, accidents or moments that changed entire movies.

The Johansson-Jackman story is memorable for almost the opposite reason.

Nothing scandalous happened. There was no secret feud and no dramatic romance hidden from the public.

Instead, two actors who seemed to occupy very different corners of popular culture discovered a shared enthusiasm that dated back to their lives before those movies.

Jackman may have been Wolverine to millions of viewers, but he was also a Tony-winning song-and-dance performer.

Johansson may have already been known for movies such as Lost in Translation and Match Point, but beneath that screen image was someone who said musical theater had helped inspire her to become an actor at all.

Put them together in a makeup trailer, and the glamorous movie set briefly disappeared.

For a few hours in the morning, Scoop was not a murder mystery, The Prestige was still somewhere in the future, and two Hollywood stars were simply singing the shows they loved.

That may be the most unexpected connection between their two 2006 movies: the year audiences watched Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman surrounded by magicians, secrets and dangerous characters, some of the most memorable entertainment happening off camera was much simpler.

It sounded like Broadway.