When you cover Hollywood movies, it’s fair to say that interviewing boxer Sugar Ray Leonard is not something you’re expecting. Yet here he is, one of the greatest boxers of all time, sitting with Metro in a Beverly Hills hotel suite talking about his behind-the-scenes role as fight choreographer and trainer to Hugh Jackman in the action movie Real Steel.

“It was an interesting fact of my involvement in the film,” the laid-back champ acknowledges, looking relaxed and casual in a red vest over a white shirt and black pants. “Could I teach Hugh Jackman to be a fighter in less than two or three weeks? But I think he really pulled it off because he’s a perfectionist and he was driven to be authentic with his motions and punches. I think he missed his calling!”

Real Steel stars Hugh Jackman as Charlie, a washed-up boxer in the near future when his sport has been taken over by 8-foot robots, forcing him to become a small-time robot fight promoter with low-end ‘bots’. When his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) arrives under tragic circumstances, neither wants anything to do with the other. But after Max discovers Atom, a scrap-heap robot that has the potential to give Charlie one last comeback, they come together in an unexpected way.

The affable Jackman bounds into the same hotel suite that Leonard is leaving, gives him a bear-hug as he exits and enthusiastically sits down to rave about the man who helped him portray the ex-boxer. “Sugar Ray taught me beyond just showing me how to throw a punch,” he explains, “but he also talked about the mentality of the fighter and about the guy in the corner. He knew for people to care about the robots they would have to see that I had a real connection with them too, and that was a really great insight.”

Although the Aussie star attracted attention recently on WWE Raw when wrestler Dolph Ziggler later tweeted that Jackman gave him a hairline mandibular fracture with a punch that went viral on the Internet, Jackman downplays the feat. “I hit him pretty hard because he told me to, but those guys are prone to exaggeration,” he chuckles, “which is why I hit him in the first place!”

The Wolverine star looks chuffed when told Leonard thought he missed his calling. “I am very competitive, there is no doubt,” he confesses, “but Sugar Ray also said no champ ever came out of Beverly Hills and I went to private school in Sydney so I don’t think any champion boxer ever came from Knox Grammer School either!”

When Metro visited the Detroit set of the movie last year, director Shawn Levy - whose credits include Night at the Museum, The Pink Panther and Date Night – invited us to watch a pivotal robot fight in the Michigan city’s largest stadium, Cobo Arena, where two real boxers were standing on stilts wearing data capturing jumpsuits as Jackman was reacting on the sidelines to the punches being thrown, and hundreds of extras cheered on. At the back of the stadium, surrounded by security, Levy shows us two completely functioning 8-foot robots that will appear as Atom, Charlie’s bot, and Zeus, the undefeated champion, in walking and standing scenes that allow them to be operated by remote control. The filmmaker says he built four of the robots to scale and opted for motion capture after talking to the film’s producer, Steven Spielberg. “I told him I wanted to make a humanist robot movie and he encouraged me not to go digital, even though the technology was there,” he continues. “He reminded me they also built some real dinosaurs and animatronics in Jurassic Park because there is a reality to the acting that you don’t get if it’s just fake.”

Jackman confirms he won’t be on the sidelines early next year, facing off against Russell Crowe in Les Miserables, based on producer Cameron Mackintosh’s musical take on Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel. The film will be directed by Tom (The King’s Speech) Hooper and stars Crowe as Inspector Javert and Jackman as Jean Valjean. “I have great respect for Russell and that battle between characters is vital for this movie to work, so I’m really excited about the casting,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of musicals in my life and I’ve done a lot of movies so it feels like a movie musical has been a long time coming.”

Movie: Real Steel
Genre: action drama
Buzz: Plenty of buzz, especially from X-Men fans; 85% audiences polled on www.rottentomatoes.com want to see.
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo
Director: Shawn Levy
Rated: TBA
Release: October 6