Joel Edgerton on Johnny Depp, Ridley Scott and why he still feels like a Hollywood impostor

JOEL Edgerton is hanging with Johnny Depp and Ridley Scott for now – but he’s still all too aware of how quickly success can slip away.

HAVING followed Ridley Scott’s biblical blockbuster Exodus: Gods and Kings with a starring role opposite Johnny Depp in the crime drama Black Mass, you’d imagine Joel Edgerton to finally be in a position where he could kick back and relax.

But the 40-year-old actor says success only raises the stakes.

“I do remember being on set with Ridley and thinking: ‘this is as good as it gets’,’’ he acknowledges.

“But strangely, every time I get to a point where I think, okay, everything is moving along quite nicely, and the scripts are coming in, it makes me even more stressed out because I think: I’ve got to read all this stuff, I’ve got to do due diligence, I’ve got to find the great thing.

“There is this real awareness in Hollywood, and there are precedents everywhere, that two or three bad choices in a row will put an end to all of it.”

HEAD-TO-HEAD: Joel Edgerton takes on Christian Bale in Exodus: Gods and Kings

AUSSIE CRIME DRAMA: Joel Edgerton’s new film Felony delves deep

Happy to take second billing ... Joel Edgerton (right) and Christian Bale in Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Edgerton has just flown in from Boston after wrapping on Black Mass, the story of Irish mobster Whitey Bulger, which also features Benedict Cumberbatch and Kevin Bacon.

Sitting in the boardroom of the converted Chippendale warehouse that’s home to Goalpost Pictures, the Sydney-based production company behind Edgerton’s homegrown crime drama Felony, the writer/actor/producer and soon-to-be director gives the impression of being extraordinarily comfortable in his own skin.

But there is clearly another, more driven side to the man, who uses any downtime he has on set to write screenplays. He is currently adapting Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V for Warner Brothers with Animal Kingdom director David Michod.

At this point in his career, of course, Edgerton can probably afford to acknowledge a healthy degree of self-doubt.

Playing it safe ... Joel Edgerton on the set of Black Mass in Boston.

“When I do the movie with Johnny Depp, he’s the big star. I’m No 2. There is a safety in that,’’ he says.

“In a way, coming home to do Felony feels like I am putting myself on the slab more because they are all my thoughts and ideas on the screen and I am putting myself in first position.”

Edgerton wrote the role of Malcolm Toohey, a decorated detective who covers up his role in an early morning hit-and-run accident that hospitalises a young cyclist, with himself in mind.

He also produced the modestly-budgeted film alongside seasoned filmmaker Rosemary Blight (The Sapphires.)

He compares the process to the plot of a film such as The Princess Bride.

“Those movies where someone goes out and finds the giant, and then together with the giant, they start collecting a team of specialists. That’s what this project was like. I didn’t know (director) Matt (Saville), so I had to track him down. Then once I had him, it was a matter of talking to him about who he liked as a producer.”

Somewhere in that epic, four-year-long quest to gather all the necessary components together, Edgerton also managed to secure the services of rising star Jai Courtney, who has just finished filming the Terminator reboot, Genisys, and veteran British actor Tom Wilkinson. Melissa George plays Edgerton’s wife.

Risk-taking behaviour ... Joel Edgerton puts himself on the line with Aussie crime drama Felony.

While justifiably proud of the finished result, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last year to an enthusiastic critical response, the actor is also keenly aware that a number of other high-profile Australian films have failed at the box office recently, including Michod’s The Rover, on which Edgerton has a story credit.

The brutal nature of the movie business, both at home and in the US, could well be the driving factor in Edgerton’s creative “restlessness”.

The Blacktown boy is about to take eight months off from acting to direct his first feature, Weirdo, about a man who is forced to confront the past when it comes back to haunt him. Edgerton will play a small role in the film, to be produced by US-based Rebecca Yeldham (The Motorcyle Diaries, The Kite Runner) and shot in California.

He knows there’s a risk in making himself unavailable, as an actor, for such an extended period of time.

In the driver’s seat ... Joel Edgerton and Tom Wilkinson in a scene from Felony.

“But I suspect the future for me is not all that happy if all I am doing is being an actor because eventually I won’t be the young hero, I will be the guy who is sitting around on set doing bits and pieces.”

Edgerton might have made 10 American-financed films since his international breakthrough performance in Animal Kingdom, including Warrior, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, but he’s still not entirely at home there.

“There is still the part of me that doesn’t back myself, that when I am on movie sets (like Exodus or Black Mass), for the first week or two, I feel like I might be replaced or fired.”

The part of Edgerton that doesn’t back himself might be the reason he actually had to be persuaded to sign up for the role of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses to Christian Bale’s Moses in Exodus, which opens in Australia on December 11.

“I hadn’t shown any real interest in it because I didn’t see myself in that role,’’ says the actor, who only found out he had landed the part when it was announced in the trade press.

Hard act to follow ... Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

It’s a continuing theme for Edgerton, who also couldn’t imagine himself playing an aristocratic bully such as The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan until Baz Luhrmann tapped him on the shoulder.

Edgerton took Scott’s call on the way to visit a friend in Annandale in Sydney’s inner west. “I pulled over to the side of the road to have the conversation, which was exciting in itself. But I still wasn’t convinced I was the right person for the job.”

That’s why he decided to fly to London to meet with the director of Alien and Gladiator in person.

“Ridley whirled into Pinewood (studios) in his town car, a Mercedes I think, and it was like I was in the middle of a conversation that we had already started having.

“He dragged me to all the different departments and then looked at me and said: can I shave your head? Then he drew eyeliner on me.” The next thing Edgerton knew he was listening to Scott’s filmmaking stories over a steak dinner.

“My eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger and I was like: well, I guess I am here to stay. And I never left London.”

see Felony opens today