Hugh Jackman: A Timeline of His Divorce and New Relationship

In the article that follows, I trace how a 27-year marriage ended and how a new relationship became public in careful stages afterward. If you're building a new relationship of your own, ScanMyLove looks at the conversations you're already having with a partner and helps you see the patterns inside them. And if the end of a long relationship, or rebuilding in its wake, speaks to your own experience, I've designed a breakup test that helps place where you stand in the process of moving on.

Few Hollywood separations have unfolded as visibly, or as slowly, as the one between Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness. Their split ended a 27-year marriage, ran in parallel with a second divorce on Sutton Foster's side, and gave way, over more than two years, to a new relationship confirmed in careful, public stages. Read chronologically, the sequence of dated events tells a clearer story than any single headline — and it says more about how public breakups actually unfold than about any one person's private motives.

Jackman, an Australian actor known internationally for playing Wolverine across more than two decades of X-Men and related films (2000-2024), has spent much of 2026 focused on new professional projects — including audio theatre work developed with producer Sonia Friedman and Audible. His public profile means that a personal timeline like this one has been documented, almost date by date, across entertainment media rather than emerging as a single announcement.

A 27-Year Marriage Ends

The September 2023 Announcement

On September 15, 2023, Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness announced, in a joint statement, that they were separating after 27 years of marriage. The announcement described the decision as amicable and framed it as a mutual one — the kind of statement that gives the public a fact (a marriage has ended) without disclosing the reasoning behind it. That distinction matters: what circulated afterward in entertainment coverage was, in large part, speculation built on top of a short, deliberately spare statement.

What an Amicable Announcement Does — and Doesn't — Establish

A joint statement announcing separation is a documented fact. It is not a window into either person's internal experience of the marriage's end, and it does not, on its own, explain why a 27-year relationship reached this point. Treating the statement as the full story — rather than as one dated data point — is a common trap in how long marriages get covered once they become public news. As I explore in my book Surviving the Breakup: From Heartbreak to Renewal, what a joint statement leaves out.

Two Divorces, Running in Parallel

Sutton Foster's Own Filing, October 2024

A little over a year after the Jackman-Furness announcement, Sutton Foster filed for divorce from her own husband in October 2024. The following month, Us Weekly reported that Foster and Jackman were officially a couple — the first widely cited confirmation that a relationship between the two had become public.

Furness's Filing and the June 2025 Finalization

Deborra-Lee Furness filed her own divorce petition in New York in May 2025. The Jackman-Furness divorce was finalized as uncontested on June 3, 2025 — nearly two years after the original separation announcement. The gap between the 2023 statement and the 2025 finalization reflects how long formal divorce proceedings can take even when both parties describe the split as amicable; it is not, by itself, evidence of anything beyond the paperwork timeline.

Two Timelines, One Overlap

For a period of several months in late 2024 and into 2025, two separate divorce processes were technically active at the same time: Foster's, filed in October 2024, and Furness's, filed in May 2025 and finalized in June 2025. Overlapping legal timelines like this are not unusual when new relationships become public before older divorces are finalized — court filings and personal announcements do not run on the same schedule, and the order in which they become public rarely matches the order in which the underlying decisions were made.

A New Relationship, Confirmed in Stages

From Private Reports to a Red-Carpet Debut

After the November 2024 confirmation, the Jackman-Foster relationship remained largely out of the spotlight for almost a year. The couple made their first official public appearance together in October 2025, at the AFI Fest premiere of Song Sung Blue — a red-carpet debut that functioned as a clear, visible marker distinct from earlier press reporting.

Instagram, Then the Met Gala

On November 26, 2025, Hugh Jackman made the relationship public on Instagram, moving the confirmation from press reporting to a direct, first-person statement. The couple's next major public milestone came in May 2026, with their debut appearance together at the Met Gala — by that point, more than two and a half years after the original September 2023 separation announcement. This is exactly what I explore in Understanding Your Attachment Style, how new relationships take shape.

Why Celebrity Relationships Get Confirmed in Stages

A Recognizable Pattern, Not a Personal One

Staggered disclosure — private reports, then a first joint outing, then a direct social media statement, then a major public event — is a familiar pattern for high-profile relationships that begin while divorce proceedings from a previous marriage are still active. It reflects legal timing, media dynamics, and the ordinary desire for privacy during an unfinished process, rather than anything specific to the people involved in this particular case.

A Psychological Perspective: Media Exposure and the Loss of Narrative Control

High-profile figures under sustained media attention face a specific dynamic: once private information becomes newsworthy, disclosure stops being a private choice and turns into a sequence driven by outside triggers — a leaked report, a paparazzi photo, a reporter's question — rather than by the people involved. Staged confirmation, of the kind traced above (a private report in November 2024, a red-carpet appearance eleven months later, a first-person Instagram post, and finally a joint appearance at a major public event), is one of the few ways to reclaim a measure of that control: each stage lets the individuals confirm only what they choose, on a timeline they can partly shape rather than one set entirely by outside reporting. This loss of narrative control under sustained exposure, and the staged process often used to counter it, is a documented feature of public life in general — not a description of how any of the three people in this particular story experienced it.

Reading a Public Timeline Without Overreading It

A dated public record — a joint statement, a court filing, a red-carpet photo, a social media post — documents that something happened and when. It does not document why, and it does not describe how any of the three people involved experienced the period in question. The most reliable way to follow a story like this one is to separate the confirmed dates from the commentary that accumulates around them.

Related Reading

If you're interested in how people form new relationships after a long-term partnership ends, our complete guide to attachment styles looks at the general patterns behind how people connect after a major relational change.

FAQ

When did Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness get divorced?

They announced their separation on September 15, 2023, after 27 years of marriage. Furness filed her own divorce petition in New York in May 2025, and the divorce was finalized as uncontested on June 3, 2025.

Is Hugh Jackman in a relationship with Sutton Foster?

Yes. Us Weekly reported the couple's relationship as confirmed in November 2024. They made their first official public appearance together in October 2025, Jackman confirmed the relationship on Instagram in November 2025, and the couple appeared together at the Met Gala in May 2026.

Was Sutton Foster married before her relationship with Hugh Jackman?

Yes. Sutton Foster filed for divorce from her own husband in October 2024. Details of that marriage or its ending have not been part of the confirmed public record beyond the filing itself.