Joel Edgerton’s acclaimed movie Loving made him embarrassed by Australian marriage equality laws

HE’S one of our biggest stars, but Joel Edgerton said he felt Australia was ‘diminished’ while promoting his latest movie.

THERE’S no mistaking the pride in Joel Edgerton’s voice when he talks about his new movie, Loving.

The Aussie actor has taken some precious time from his busy schedule filming spy thriller Red Sparrow opposite Jennifer Lawrence in Hungary to talk about the role that earned him his first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor this year, and which many thought should have also been rewarded with an Oscar nod.

In the acclaimed drama he plays real-life figure Richard Loving, a man who fell foul of the authorities in Civil Rights era America simply by marrying a white woman — an act against the law in many parts of the South at the time.

Richard and his wife Mildred (played in the film by Ruth Negga, who did nab an Oscar nomination) were effectively banished from the state of Virginia under threat of imprisonment if they returned. Their long, quietly determined struggle to be together turned them into reluctant civil rights heroes and resulted in the US Supreme Court declaring that marriage was a fundamental right.

As proud as he is of Loving, Edgerton, 42, says he was uncomfortable promoting the movie in the US last year, given the lack of progress for marriage equality in his homeland.

“It felt very embarrassing, quite frankly, to go on a press tour celebrating equality in marriage throughout the United States as we did with Loving and have to acknowledge that in Australia there was what I consider to be a political smokescreen, procrastination or delay tactics attitude towards the subject of same sex marriage. I felt it diminished us as people on an international scale,” he says.

Joel Edgerton as real life civil rights hero Richard Loving in the acclaimed drama Loving.

On his path to becoming one of our most reliable acting talents, both in Australia and overseas, Edgerton has mostly shied away from talking politics, unlike many of his colleagues. But so shocked was he by the laws that existed in the US less than 50 years ago — and so struck by their parallels in Australia’s current marriage equality debate — that he eventually felt compelled to speak out and stress the inevitability of change.

“As much as you can try to legislate against or prevent it, change will happen eventually,” he says. “The people who stand in the way of change will ultimately be the villains of that story. It would be nice for people who stand in the way of change to imagine themselves as the villain and to question which side of history they want to be on.”

Edgerton acutely felt the weight of responsibility that came with paying the real-life Richard Loving. He borrowed liberally from the 2011 documentary The Loving Story and sought from the couple’s daughter, Peggy. He was drawn to Richard and Mildred’s determination against seemingly insurmountable odds and touched by Richard’s suppressed anger and shame that he couldn’t protect his wife from the entrenched racism of the time.

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga at the Golden Globe Awards. Picture: Getty

But he was also at pains to emphasise the happiness of the family unit away from the cameras that the Lovings so disliked.

“The tragedy of constant injustice is that it teaches you to be silent,” says Edgerton. “Then anger becomes atrophy, then frustration. Richard turned that in on himself and felt very ashamed that he couldn’t fight and couldn’t fix the situation.”

The Sydney-born actor found he had some commonalities with Loving.

“There’s a lot of Richard in me — specifically that I also try to avoid conflict. I’m not good at it. I inherited that from my mother,” he explains. “Though, if you push me far enough, I will flare up.

“And I possess a mild pride that wants to fight every now and then, but I never do,” he laughs. “I tend to sort of suck things up.”

For the sake of authenticity, it was imperative that Edgerton take on the physical attributes of Loving. This required the arduous turning of his mousy brown hair to blond.

“Out of respect for a true story I needed to look like him. It was important we stayed true to that even to the extent of his posture, which said a lot about how he felt about himself. He was crippled by the situation even more than Mildred was; she really took charge, she was the leader.

“When you looked at him, he truly was a redneck. He actually had a red neck,” Edgerton smiles. “He looked like the kind of guy you’d expect to be against this kind of marriage, like he was part of a KKK chapter.”

Joel Edgerton in a scene from 2010 Aussie hit, Animal Kingdom.

After 22 years on screen, Edgerton’s resume definitely leans towards the dark and difficult side of things, evident in such movies as 2010s Animal Kingdom, which won him Best Actor at the AACTA Awards as well as a burgeoning international career, 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and the 2015 gangster tale Black Mass.

Even his debut as writer-director, 2015’s The Gift — in which he also starred with Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall — was an unsettling tale of an old schoolmate who starts turning up to a couple’s house uninvited. It earnt him a nomination from the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directing — First Time Feature Film.

“I’ve often wondered whether part of the reason I became an actor was because I get to express these sides of me that I don’t normally feel free to express in my normal life,” Edgerton muses, “like violence or malignance, the darker sides of the human experience.”

Considering he once said he was regarded as “not pretty enough to be on Neighbours and Home and Away,” Edgerton is not doing too badly at turning darkness into light.

He laughs loudly.

“I’m glad you brought this up because I want to qualify this,” he says, his voice rising in volume. “It wasn’t like I went into a room and someone said, ‘Hey, you ain’t pretty’. It was more about being an awkward teenager. I wasn’t a swaggering, young, tanned thing.

“I hadn’t got it together like some kids are able to do, just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I took my time to stumble my way through a nice, slow-build career. That’s been important for me.

“And I’m happy about the way everything has happened.”

LOVING OPENS THURSDAY

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE

Joel Edgerton and Will Smith in a scene from the coming Netflix sci-fi cop thriller Bright.

It looks like the mashup movie of the year and Will Smith described it as The Lord of the Rings meets Training Day.

Netflix film Bright is Joel Edgerton’s next big project, set to drop on the streaming service in December. The cop thriller is set in a world that looks very much like ours — except that fantasy creatures such as orcs, elves and fairies exist alongside humans.

Edgerton, under layers of make-up, plays an orc cop; Smith is his human counterpart.

“It will be awesome,” Edgerton laughs.

“Will has been in too many fantastic, massive-grossing movies to not be able to sum up a movie very well and I think he said it perfectly. It looks like a hardcore, immediate, modern film but some of the characters in the society that the film is set in are characters that you would have read about in Lord of the Rings — elves and orcs — and magic is a real thing that has been clamped down by the government.

“It’s basically a mashup movie and a piece of entertainment, but its foundation and dramatic thrust is about otherness again — race and minorities and the need for people to not judge each other.

“It’s basically the same movie (as Loving) but one is a period true story and the other one is a movie with orcs.”

Originally published as Joel Edgerton’s acclaimed movie Loving made him embarrassed by Australian marriage equality laws