It was meant to be a romantic video message just for his wife, but cancer-stricken Kristian Anderson’s four-minute tribute, starring Hollywood heartthrob Hugh Jackman, has become a global phenomenon.
Mr Anderson, who was last year diagnosed with bowel and liver cancer, contacted the Wolverine star via an Australian radio host and within three days had an e-mail from the actor’s assistant containing a video clip, he said.
Mr Jackman appears in the video to tell Mr Anderson’s wife of seven years, “He loves you Rachel, he loves you”.
“Hugh Jackman certainly gave the clip some Hollywood glamour,” Anderson, 35, told Australian magazine Woman’s Day published on Monday.
“It’s certainly taken its popularity to a whole new level.”
Mr Jackman’s unlikely co-star in the touching video, which has been viewed some 295,000 times on the Vimeo website ( http://vimeo.com/14325334 ) is New Zealand Prime Minister John Key who introduces the video with a birthday message to Rachel.
“I wanted someone from New Zealand, where Rachel was born, to be in the video and I thought ‘Who better than the guy who runs the place?’“ Mr Anderson explained to the magazine.
Rachel said she did a “double take” on seeing Mr Jackman addressing her onscreen, but it was seeing her two sons Cody, three, and Jakob, two, with their father in the video which made her cry.
“I was blown away,” she told the magazine.
“I was gobsmacked when John Key and Hugh Jackman appeared. It’s a good thing I was sitting down, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness that’s Hugh Jackman’.”
Mr Anderson, who in the video holds handwritten cards in which he thanks his wife for her support as he undergoes chemotherapy, said he decided on the format because he didn’t think he could do justice to his feelings in words.
He said he was inspired by one of the couple’s favourite films, Love Actually, in which a heartsick character tells a woman he loves her via placards.
In Mr Anderson’s video, one of these cards reads: “Without you... Life just doesn’t work. I need you like I need a cure for cancer.”