Joel Edgerton on self-doubt, The Boys in the Boat and whether he could still take down Tom Hardy
Despite a 20-year blockbuster career working with some of the world’s biggest names, the Aussie star has revealed one of his greatest fears.
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Despite all his success, fame and accolades, Joel Edgerton admits he still feels like he’s an underdog.
The multitalented Aussie actor, writer, director and producer has been one of the country’s most successful exports in the 20 years since he broke through locally on The Secret Life of Us, thanks to roles in global commercial and critical hits such as Star Wars, Animal Kingdom, Warrior, The Great Gatsby and Zero Dark Thirty.
But no matter how many wins he has starring alongside A-listers such as Jennifer Lawrence and Will Smith, and directing the likes of Jason Bateman, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, somehow Edgerton has a nagging feeling that it’s still not quite enough.
“I feel like I walk through my life like I’m an underdog and that I am never going to live up to my potential, and that everything’s stacked against me all the time,” says Edgerton, back in his home town of Sydney for Christmas with his partner Christine Centenera and their two-year-old twins.
“No matter how successful I feel I get on the outside, I’m always doubting myself, and I think that self-doubt is something that lives inside all of us and makes us respond to any underdog story or to get behind the sports team that we’re watching on TV and go ‘come on, you can do it’.”
That self-doubt – Edgerton has spoken candidly about his battle with anxiety in the past – and his love of a sporting underdog story was one of the many reasons the Golden Globe-nominated actor was drawn to his new movie, The Boys in the Boat. Directed by fellow actor-director George Clooney, the old-school sporting drama tells the true story of a US university rowing crew during the Great Depression.
Mostly from the wrong side of the tracks – with some seeking a place on the team of eight just to get a roof over their head and food on the table – they are transformed into a crack sporting unit by Edgerton’s coach, Al Ulbrickson, and overcome adversity, poverty and prejudice to take on the world’s best in front Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
Edgerton says he knew precious little about the sport before he signed on – he remembered Australia’s gold-medal-winning Oarsome Foursome and occasionally tuned in when the Olympics were on – but Clooney’s pitch was so compelling that he couldn’t say no.
“I was like, ‘this is clearly built to be a movie’,” Edgerton says. “It’s almost one of those unbelievable true stories, but that every aspect of it was true and that it stacked up the way that it did is kind of awesome. And that it ends in front of Hitler was the icing on the cake.”
Edgerton says that he and Clooney discussed movies such as the Gene Hackman classic Hoosiers in the lead-up to the shoot, and he also did a deep dive into the art of coaching, and specifically the old-school coaches who are intensely protective of their players but look like “they have almost no pleasure in their job”.
He also looked back to coaches of the teams that he had followed as a youth – Jack Gibson from his beloved Parramatta Eels in the NRL, and Phil Jackson of the Chicago Bulls in the NBL.
“You will see them celebrate a victory but you don’t see a whole lot of other warmth from them,” Edgerton says. “It’s all about tactics and getting the job done. The clues were there in the script about Ulbrickson being somebody who barely cracks a smile, and I secretly thought, ‘great I can just grimace my way through the movie’.
“But I was doing a lot of thinking about how coaches really are quasi-fathers. I think that was the important thing is realising that coaches, whether they like it or not, fulfil this role of being a father, in this case to nine boys.”
A little over a decade ago, Edgerton starred in his own sporting underdog story, opposite Tom Hardy in the under-appreciated mixed martial arts movie Warrior. To prepare for that role as a schoolteacher who gets into the cage to win a cash prize that will set his struggling family up forever, he got into the best shape of his life and trained for months in the brutal art of fighting.
While in the end Edgerton was glad to be the guy in the suit rather than one of the boys in the boat, part of him envied the fact that the actors playing the rowing squad had an intense boot camp to prepare for the some of the most realistic and exciting rowing scenes ever captured on film.
“You’re being asked to arrive months in advance of the shoot to learn a skill that you never really learnt before and try in a very quick space of time to get to a point where the audience would believe you’re a professional at something,” he says. “And the benefits of it through all the pain are so excellent, and even just a sense of self-worth and pride that you get for having broken through your own boundaries. I remember looking at all of them going ‘you guys are going to have a wonderful experience’ and then watching it happen, and I was so impressed with what they achieved.”
Asked whether he could still replicate the brutal finale of Warrior and take down Hardy, who secretly won a jiu-jitsu competition in the UK last year, Edgerton laughs.
“I doubt it,” he says. “I don’t think I could take anyone. I could barely take my son.”
Edgerton also immediately saw the parallels between coaching a team and directing a film, and drew on his own experiences behind the camera for his well-received 2015 feature debut The Gift, as well as his 2018 conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, which starred Oscar-winning compatriots Crowe and Kidman. And just as the responsibility of leading the team and making tough calls weighs heavily on Ulbrickson in The Boys in the Boat, Edgerton says that he feels similarly on a film set making sure the whole exceeds the sum of its parts.
“To race and making films, you’re only as good as your lowest common denominator,” he says. “So everything has to be of a quality and, in a film, if the costumes aren’t right or the set isn’t built right or doesn’t look right, or doesn’t photograph right, or the cinematography – any component of the film can let the film down. So you’ve got a set a high benchmark, and I think the same goes for sport.”
Edgerton is also looking forward to the screen adaptation of Trent Dalton’s bestseller, Boy Swallows Universe, which drops on Netflix the week after The Boys in the Boat arrives in cinemas. After reading the book, Edgerton was so impressed that he teamed up with the author to produce the eight-episode limited series (there were originally discussions for him to act in it as well but the Brisbane shoot clashed with The Boys in the Boat).
“Trent is just such a beautiful guy,” says Edgerton. “The book is incredible and I think anyone who’s read it would agree. I love that it’s dealt in subjects that fascinate me that are darker subjects, but does it through the prism of reflection and memory and magic realism, which take off some of the icky, darker edges off some of the darker subjects.
“I remember it was a full nostalgia dive for me because even though he’s talking about the world of Brisbane and Darra – I grew up in Dural – but my first car was a car that features in the book, a blue Kingswood. And he talks about the Parramatta Eels so much in the book, that I thought Trent and I are like kindred spirits in some way. Although I don’t recall my parents ever ending up in Boggo Road …|”
The Boys In the Boat is in cinemas January 4. Boy Swallows Universe streams on Netflix from January 11
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