Joel Edgerton opens up about birth of his twins and work/life juggle
Just two months into filming the Ron Howard-directed Thirteen Lives in Queensland, actor Joel Edgerton got the phone call that changed his life.
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There was something appealing to Joel Edgerton about the idea of playing an Australian in the movie Thirteen Lives.
He had been offered the role of rescue diver and anaesthetist Dr Richard “Harry” Harris in early 2021, a year after he had serendipitously passed the film’s director, Ron Howard, in a hotel foyer in Atlanta, Georgia, and thought to himself, “I’d really love to work with Ron at some point, I really like him as a person and I think he makes excellent movies.”
The movie, based on the successful 2018 Thai cave rescue, was also filming on the Gold Coast in a refreshing opportunity for Edgerton to work in his home country.
But it dawned on the actor that his excitement about the role was somewhat simpler.
“Every now and then,” Edgerton, 48, explains, “I realise it’s been a while since I’ve actually used my own voice in a movie, as in not had to use an accent.”
He has enjoyed a successful 20 years in acting since he stepped off Australian series The Secret Life of Us on to the set of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002) – a role he has since reprised in new Disney+ series Obi Wan Kenobi. And with added credits as a director and producer, his Hollywood career in recent years has been a routine dance around the globe.
So when he was offered the role on Thirteen Lives, working with a filmmaker freshly added to his bucket list, it felt strange to then issue a kind of ultimatum to the Academy Award-winning director.
His partner, Christine Centenera, was expecting twins, their first children together, and while the movie was a perfect fit to bring him home to Australia, Edgerton – who like many Australians in Hollywood had become accustomed to being pulled away from special occasions at home – was not going to allow himself to miss the birth of his children.
The pandemic meant he had to complete two weeks’ hotel quarantine to enter Queensland in early 2021 and border rules threatened to separate him from Centenera in Sydney.
“It was tricky,” he says.
“I nearly didn’t do the movie because of the pandemic, and the border lockdowns were quite strict.”
It is notoriously difficult to get days off during a film production – they operate on tight schedules. But while Howard, 68, is a prolific Hollywood movie maker, he is also a father of four, including twin daughters.
“I had a long conversation with Ron about it. He said the moment it happens I will let you go,” Edgerton explains.
Of course, that conversation felt mostly theoretical to them both until Edgerton got the call two months into filming on the Gold Coast last May that his children were arriving early.
“I won’t get too much into the timing of it,” he smiles, recalling the slight panic.
“But it was supposed to be: shoot the movie, month off, welcome babies. And they, as twins do, came incredibly early. Ron was true to his word and was like, ‘we’ll see you in seven or eight days’.”
Edgerton greets me via Zoom from London in mid-July, preparing for the global release of Thirteen Lives on Amazon Prime Video the following month.
He explains he’s just wrapped filming a lead role in feature film The Boys in the Boat, directed by George Clooney.
“And now I’m basically being my partner’s support as she goes to work,” he grins. “So we are sort of doing a bit of balancing time, really. It works – so far so well.”
Centenera is the fashion director of Vogue Australia and while they have been together since 2018 – having known each other much longer – they have chosen to keep their relationship private, and are doing the same with their twins, now aged one, whose names they haven’t released publicly.
Family has always been a pillar for Edgerton. He was born in Blacktown, in Sydney’s west, and both he and his brother Nash, a stuntman and filmmaker, have enjoyed remarkable global success in film.
Edgerton has starred in the likes of blockbusters King Arthur, The Great Gatsby and The King – which he also co-wrote and produced – and wrote, directed, and acted in drama Boy Erased (2018), in which he cast fellow Australians Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman and Troye Sivan. Nash was the stunt co-ordinator on the film, one of many projects the brothers have worked on together, and they are both part of the Australian film collective Blue-Tongue Film.
But as Edgerton began to plan a family with Centenera, he felt the niggling concern over his life abroad, away from his family, deepen. And he began prioritising projects that would bring his worlds together, back to Australia.
“It was something that started to become a big, concentrated concern for me a few years ago,” he explains.
“Particularly around family stuff, wanting to spend more time with my family and not just having a family that was spending more time in Australia.
“But I’m away from my parents a lot, and now that I have kids, I’m keeping my kids away from my parents and so there’s this desire to keep all of us together more.
“And I miss Australia when I’m not there,” he adds.
“So knowing that projects take a long time to cook up, I guess, the gestation of them can be a couple of years or more, starting to cultivate those things a few years ago is now starting to happen.”
Edgerton was part of a consortium of producers that bought the screen rights to best-selling Brisbane-based novel Boy Swallows Universe, by local writer Trent Dalton, in 2019.
The following year, after the pandemic pause, he produced and starred in South Australian thriller The Stranger, and so an opportunity to film Thirteen Lives in Queensland by the start of 2021 felt like a fitting continuation of his commitment to being home.
Edgerton had known about the project since it was first being written, around the same time he passed Howard in his Atlanta hotel where he’d just wrapped mini series The Underground Railroad in March 2020 as the pandemic was breaking out.
“Weirdly, a year later I got a call about playing Dr Harry. And I knew who Dr Harry was,” he says.
“I had seen interviews with him and I knew him to be an excellent person, in the true sense, so the opportunity to play him was very exciting.
“The idea of shooting in Australia, shooting in Queensland, shooting with Ron on this incredible true story, and also … when everybody in different ways was having their own tough time through the pandemic, to be able to tell a story that was so hopeful, that had a hopeful outcome, felt like a really special thing to do and I was really happy to be involved.”
The world collectively held its breath in 2018 when 12 boys and their soccer coach were stranded deep in the flooded Chiang Rai cave system for 17 days before remarkably being ferried 4km to safety.
Harris and British cave divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, played by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell respectively in the film, were some of the many rescuers celebrated around the world for their life-risking heroism.
Edgerton remembers following the story for different reasons than most. He was celebrating his 44th birthday home in Australia on June 23 when the alarm was raised and he recalls the absurdity he felt celebrating a birthday as the world turned its focus to the stranded soccer team.
“It was the moment I got drawn in, as the rest of the world did, into the potential fate of these kids,” he says.
“I remember it very well as the world sort of held its breath waiting to see if it was possible to get these boys and their coach out.”
Harris was impossibly tasked with anaesthetising the 13 people inside the cave so they could be carried out by the experienced rescue divers – a feat that had never been attempted before – and he did so accepting that they all might die on the journey, or be left instead to die in the flooded caves if he didn’t.
The remarkable outcome, all 13 of them surviving the treacherous 4km dive, saw him jointly awarded Australian of the Year in 2019 with cave diver Craig Challen.
Because of the global rights in place for the various projects about the rescue – there’s an upcoming Netflix series as well as documentaries – Edgerton wasn’t able to discuss the role with Harris.
“There’s a whole world of conversation we could have around the legalities of having access to real people in this story because everybody wanted to tell this story,” he explains. “But I had access to his book.
“I’ve since met Dr Harris socially, we had a barbecue together in Adelaide. I know him without a doubt to be one of the great people I’ve ever met, a genuine, very special man.”
Offering a wry smile, he adds, “there was a lot of acting required because I’m not an excellent person.”
Edgerton, Mortensen and Farrell were taught to dive by Stanton and fellow rescue diver Jason Mallinson, who were on set on the Gold Coast, where cave interiors had been expertly recreated from 3D studies, dropped into purpose-built water tanks and flooded to recreate the rescue.
Weaving underwater through the impossibly tight tunnels, oxygen tanks and a stunt performer attached to them, the actors understood profoundly the true weight of the rescue task these divers were faced with.
“I still … even though I think I know a lot about the story, I feel like I’ve lived part of it in a pretend fashion … I still marvel at what these guys did in the cave,” Edgerton says.
“It’s still hard to wrap my head around given the majority of it being a massive success.”
He only had five days of filming left when he returned to the Gold Coast after welcoming his twins in May. And he’s the first to admit he was prone to distraction that week.
“I think 90 per cent of that time I was on my phone, on FaceTime, and then I’d hear ‘action’ and I’d … you know, quickly do some acting,” he says, imitating ogling at his babies over the screen. “Suddenly the movie was less important.”
“But I will say this,” he adds.
“There’s a couple of scenes in the movie that really charged up for me in a different way, knowing that all of a sudden I was a parent.”
The enormity of the ethical dilemma Harris faced, the fate of these children in his hands, suddenly overwhelmed the actor.
“Harry’s world was potentially going to hinge, and his entire career – I’m getting a bit emotional thinking about it,” he pauses, “on the outcome, and his willingness to give it a try even though he knew the outcome might not work. Knowing that if he didn’t at least try the kids were more than likely going to perish anyway. And knowing that I’d become a father, thinking about Harry’s perspective on the care of 12 kids and that coach, and his potential feeling of responsibility around that, really shifted things for me. And I did have a hard time just keeping a lid on my feelings around all that stuff.”
Edgerton had to return to the US after filming, moving on to the Obi Wan Kenobi series, and – working on that balancing act with Centenera, babies in tow – he has filmed other roles abroad, finishing with The Boys in the Boat in London.
But those seeds he planted in Australia, and carefully cultivated, in recent years are beginning to bloom.
Edgerton is an executive producer on the screen adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe, a Netflix series secured for Queensland and will film across Brisbane for five months from mid-August.
He also reunited with Australian director David Michod and the team behind The King to co-write the screenplay for Wizards!, a Pete Davidson-led comedy that has been filming in tropical Queensland since June.
“Boy Swallows Universe is coming to be and I’m involved in a few other projects,” he says.
“I would definitely like to be in Australia more, shooting there more, and I really want my kids to sort of sound a bit like us. And I know that sounds weird,” he continues, contemplating it himself before finally settling on a conclusion about his nagging need for the Australian accent.
“You know what, it’s not about an accent, it’s about an identity, and I’d love for them to have an Australian identity.”
Thirteen Lives, Amazon Prime Video, out now
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