Joel Edgerton on fatherhood, his deepest fears and an unexpected Star Wars reunion
Australian actor Joel Edgerton reveals how becoming a dad transformed his approach to acting, as he takes on his most personal role yet in a new Netflix drama.
After a long and varied career of what he calls “playing dress-ups”, Joel Edgerton says his latest role – one that might well bring him his first Oscar nomination – is his most personal yet and tapped into his deepest fears.
In the new drama Train Dreams, which the Australian actor describes as “the celebration of an ordinary life”, Edgerton plays a quietly decent, orphaned woodcutter in the expanding American railroad of the early 20th century, who constantly struggles to balance the itinerant demands of his job with his role as a husband and father.
“There is stuff that my character goes through as a father and as a family man that deals with loss and grief in a pretty significant way,” Edgerton says carefully, wary of dropping any spoilers.
“There were days on set that deal with some of the darker stuff where I just realised those things are right under the surface for me.”
When Edgerton first inquired about the rights to Denis Johnson’s celebrated 2011 novella on which the movie is based seven years ago, having just directed Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman in Boy Erased, his life was completely different.
At the time, the rights were already taken, but when those same producers contacted Edgerton several years later to play the lead character of Robert Grainier, he was a father of twins with his partner Christine Centenera.
Playing a family man who wants nothing more than to provide for and protect his wife and child now seemed like “a very different prospect” and one that connected with him more deeply than any other character he’d ever played.
“Suddenly your greatest fear becomes the care and consideration and safety of your kids,” says Edgerton of his now-four-old son and daughter.
“So for me, it was not really a matter of stretching my imagination and it feels like those things are living inside of me and for that reason it was very, very personal.
“My biggest fear is stemmed from the anticipation of the birth of my kids and fears around that. They were twins and they were born very early and they were in hospital for a while and I guess that the reality of the anticipation of that became so scary that there’s things I don’t care to really think about.”
Ever since he shot to fame in Australia in The Secret Life of Us in 2001, Edgerton has made movies all around the world. His small role as Luke Skywalker’s uncle, Owen Lars, in the Star Wars prequels helped launch his career overseas and he’s since become one of our most reliable exports mixing mainstream fare such as Warrior, The Thing, Zero Dark Thirty, Black Mass and Red Sparrow with acclaimed art house projects like Master Gardener, The Stranger and Loving.
For a long time, he says, he was happy to “follow the money and follow the adventure and live out of a suitcase” but fatherhood changed all that.
“Now it becomes a question of where and when and for how long because I don’t want to be away from my kids,” he says. “I have a two-week rule – two weeks is the longest I’ll be away from them before I have to get on a plane and see them or bring them to me or whatever.”
“I’ve harboured a secret desire to be a dad for a long time and for years thought it might never be and that work would get in the way of me being a suitable person to be a dad.
“So when they came along, it became so special to me that and I realised that I wasn’t just going to have some kids and then be like, ‘All right, see you later – I’m going to go and make some movies now.’”
Despite having received critical acclaim as a director for his 2015 thriller The Gift and 2018’s Boy Erased, Edgerton is happy to be a hired hand for now.
In addition to Train Dreams releasing on Netflix next week, he also has a second season of the mind-bending Apple TV sci-fi drama Dark Matter coming out next year and has just finished shooting the prison-set black comedy Fangs with compatriot Toni Collette, which he describes as “really extreme”.
“Acting, once you get to work and once you leave work, you can sort of plug in and plug out,” he says.
“And directing really is about making every decision all the time and you come home and you have a sleepless night about the following day. I’m trying to work out how I can make another movie. I’m sure I will do it and I have a thing I want to make but I want to do it so that it suits the family.”
In the meantime, however, he kept his hand in the game by directing Harrison Ford in an ad for Glenmorangie whisky last year, an experience he admits would have completely blown away his 15-year-old movie fan self.
“I’ve never shot an ad before in my life,” he says, “and then it was Harrison, so I was like ‘oh this is cool – but now I have just got to try not to fall to pieces and I hope that he doesn’t think I’m a fool’. And we ended up just having such a marvellous time together that we’ve stayed close.”
Indeed, when Edgerton invited Ford to the Los Angeles premiere of Train Dreams last month, he was an instant yes, leaving his co-star and Rogue One protagonist Felicity Jones a little flustered and internet fans in raptures at the unexpected and unlikely gathering on the red carpet.
“We got a few Star Wars fans buzzing because you had three people that had all been in Star Wars movies,” says Edgerton, with a laugh.
“Of course Harrison’s in the coolest one of them all and Felicity’s in, I think, the best stand-alone Star Wars film – and I’m a moisture farmer.”
Despite his globetrotting lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with A-listers on red carpets and working on high profile, big budget projects, Edgerton says that the stately simplicity of Train Dreams as his character finds beauty and brutality in life, love and the natural world – despite never leaving the Pacific Northwest – was a poignant reminder to him of “how heroic an ordinary life is”.
“Some of my favourite people are people that will never have a statue built about them and some of the people that annoy me the most are people that will have a statue built about them,” he says.
“There’s dignity in the most pedestrian life and if you ask any person the right few questions, an incredible story will be there and there’s something to be learned from them.”
Train Dreams streams on Netflix from November 21.
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Originally published as Joel Edgerton on fatherhood, his deepest fears and an unexpected Star Wars reunion
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