Joel Edgerton on love, parenthood and masculinity
He’s famous for his tough-guy roles. But after decades spent brawling and brooding and kicking down the door, Joel Edgerton’s life is taking a whole new direction.
What does parenthood ask of a man? That he be more manly? Provide and protect, like a modern-day caveman? What if you’re already the manliest of men, a celebrated man’s man, a man who’s spent decades brawling and brooding and kicking down the door to the pantheon of cinematic alpha males? What if you’re Joel Edgerton?
Well, then you start to rethink everything. You rethink the red-blooded, hyper-masculine roles that define you: in Animal Kingdom, Warrior, Zero Dark Thirty and The Great Gatsby. You wonder why you’re always drawn to the inflated machismo of tough-guy roles. Dominate. Defeat. Destroy. You’d like to explore playing other types of men: sensitive, emotional, softer men. You realise that to view masculinity as one end of a spectrum is remiss.
Parenthood worms its way into your Y-chromosome and causes actual, scientifically proven, anatomical changes to your brain: new neurons boost attachment, nurturing, empathy. You refer to yourself as “Nappy Guy”. You scratch your beard and say it with pride and a hint of disbelief: Nappy Guy.
Your babies are 17 months old. Fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, and you have been introduced to the notion of stress. With partner Christine Centenera, Vogue Australia fashion director and stylist to the stars, you are jetting across time zones in a frenzy of film shoots and fashion weeks and festivals as two separate-but-equal careers hit hyperdrive, only now you’re part of a travelling circus, with sippy cups and prams and that well-loved toy you can never, ever lose. Flying on airplanes is no longer champagne and sleep masks but white-knuckled terror.
What does parenthood ask of a man? You start to feel more vulnerable which, oddly enough, causes you to let down your guard and talk about anxiety and panic attacks, ramped up by the pandemic; you surprise your interviewer with these cracks in your publicly assured, cock-of-the-walk persona. Your interviewer starts to rethink you.
You think about being home more. You rethink what love is. You recall being chased by photographers through a Sydney hospital carpark with your newborns, healthy but seven weeks premature, and your stomach clenches with an echo of fear. Tiny babies thrust into your unpractised arms just weeks before and that day they’d had an important scan scheduled and these f. king guys …
You understand the contract famous people make with the public, but it’s not just you now and you live in an unhinged world where strangers chase your family through car parks. The babies were so damn tiny. Your voice breaks along a new seam of fragility; your rugged features crumble. You mumble an apology and a few quiet sobs bubble up through the silence. What if parenthood asks of a man that he cry?
At 48, Edgerton is late to the party, but he’s always wanted to be a dad. “It’s been a crazy learning curve for me at such a weird, late-ish stage in my life,” he says. “Not that I was nihilistic, but I never imagined life after the age of 40 or if I did, I thought I’d be hobbling around with sore hips and eating through a straw.”
It’s early morning in London. Sunshine trickles in through heavy chintz curtains to light the upstairs living room of a decorous and stately home, all dark-wood furniture, sweeping staircases and ornate mirrors. This has been the family’s base while Edgerton filmed George Clooney’s Olympic period drama The Boys in the Boat, but in a few days the travelling circus will leave it behind, shifting camp to Chicago so he can start work on the Apple TV sci-fi series Dark Matter opposite Jennifer Connelly.
Dating Centenera has forced him to up his “outside-the-house fashion game”, but today he’s thrown a khaki shirt over a faded blue singlet and trackpants. “I look like Steve Irwin,” he says, fiddling with the buttons. Since leaving Australia in January for Louisiana, where Edgerton filmed Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, the ascendant It Couple has pinballed around the globe. In May, it was the Cannes Film Festival to premiere Thomas M. Wright’s The Stranger, a bleak, unbearably tense thriller that prompted a standing ovation (Edgerton, “brooding and gloomy”, gives “a career-best performance”). Then the Venice Film Festival for Master Gardener, in which he plays a former neo-Nazi opposite Sigourney Weaver (Edgerton is “captivating”, “haunted”.)
Centenera has just released a collection with US model Hailey Bieber for Wardrobe. NYC, the label she co-founded with designer Josh Goot, and she’s been bouncing between the fashion capitals of Europe. She also found time to shoot Joel for our cover story. “We look like we’re on the run from the FBI or something,” Edgerton says with a coughing laugh like a Victa lawnmower running low on fuel. “But we’re doing a pretty good job of managing Christine’s life and my life and not being apart from each other.”
The lawnmower laugh will punctuate a two-hour Zoom call, which expands and contracts around elaborate, well-considered ruminations on fatherhood. Edgerton will laugh more often than he cries, which is once. He will down two espressos and brandish the sleep-tracking smart ring fixed to his index finger (“I’m obsessed”). He will interlock uncommonly large hands behind his yoga-honed back and stretch like a contented cat.
The notoriously private actor will also, with a twinkly squint and unexpected transparency, hoist the twins onto his lap to say hello across the oceans. “He’s besotted,” says filmmaker David Michôd, who put a rocket under Edgerton’s career with 2010’s Animal Kingdom, an operatic crime drama pickled in testosterone. “Those kids are very lucky: they’ve won the dad lottery.” Michôd also worked with Edgerton on the 2019 film The King and has watched his good friend ascend to the starry firmament of Hollywood’s top tier. “Joel sits now in the best possible place,” he says. “He’s both commercially meaningful to a project and sought after by some of the most prestigious filmmakers in the world. I’m sure there are other famous Australian actors who would be envious of the kinds of projects that come his way.”
Edgerton is offered “the properly resourced movies for grown-ups that are so thin on the ground these days”, and in between he creates his own. Writing and directing the 2015 dark suburban thriller The Gift, in which he also starred as a creepy social outcast, whetted his appetite for taking the wheel. “I feel a little bit more satisfied making a project myself because, for all the extra responsibility, it’s just all-consuming on an intellectual, creative level,” he says.
He has since written, directed, produced and starred in Boy Erased, with Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, co-written The King and re-teamed with Michôd to write Wizards!, an upcoming comedy starring Pete Davidson. Edgerton has a producing credit on the Netflix series Boy Swallows Universe, and most recently was a producer on The Stranger. Based on Kate Kyriacou’s true-crime book The Sting: The Undercover Operation that Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer, The Stranger is a loose adaptation of the decade-long police investigation into one of Australia’s most infamous child murders.
Writer-director Wright (Acute Misfortune) has taken great care to avoid sensationalising the violence: all names are changed; the abduction and murder – indeed the victim – are never shown. It’s a superbly acted psychodrama featuring two heavily bearded, monosyllabic men – Edgerton’s embedded undercover cop and the suspect, played by Sean Harris – each hiding behind a façade.
Still, the film stirred up trouble even before its first showing, at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August, with Daniel’s parents Bruce and Denise Morcombe calling it “callously disrespectful” and “morally corrupt”. Edgerton, who optioned the book and brought it to Wright, says they have deliberately steered away from even talking about the real-life case. “We were really trying to tell a story that pays tribute to, and delves into the psychology of, the operators that we never get to know about,” he says. “The ones who essentially put their own lives aside in order to make the rest of us feel safe. That was the motivation for making the film and why I thought Thomas was a great person to do it. He understood the sensitivities.”
Sporting newly prominent cheekbones, a ponytail and speed-dealer sunnies, Edgerton disappears into his role as Mark, divorced father to a young boy, played by Wright’s son, Cormac. The actor is well-known for his strong work ethic, and the lengths he’ll go to physically inhabit a chameleonic range of characters. He packed on 12kg of muscle to play a martial arts fighter opposite Tom Hardy in Warrior, then backed up with boot camp for his role as a navy seal in Zero Dark Thirty. For The King his weight ballooned by 20kg, which he then whittled down with yoga. Edgerton was primed, then, when Wright sent him through a vision of his character in The Stranger: “I opened up the PDF and it was a picture of a starving dog.”
It’s testament to Edgerton’s talent that his older brother Nash says he occasionally watches a film and forgets it’s his brother on screen. “It’s a great thing that he’s hard to get a read on,” says Nash, a stuntman, actor and filmmaker, with credits including The Square, Gringo and the TV series Mr Inbetween. “That’s why he’s had such an eclectic career and played such a varied range of characters. He dives in pretty deep; he works hard and puts in the prep time and finds things about those characters that work for him.”
Edgerton recently had a stab at adding up the number of times he’s played a father on screen and estimates he has had “about 20 to 30 movie kids”. “I look back now and I don’t know that I would do anything differently,” he says. “As in, ‘I got that wrong, I performed that wrong’.”
“He’s both commercially meaningful to a project and sought after by some of the most prestigious filmmakers in the world. I’m sure there are other famous Australian actors who would be envious of the kinds of projects that come his way”
He did, however, get a glimpse of how real-life fatherhood could seep into his work when he returned to the Gold Coast set of the Prime Video film Thirteen Lives just days after the birth of his twins. He had initially been wary of signing up to play Australian diver and anaesthetist Dr Richard “Harry” Harris in Ron Howard’s take on the real-life 2018 mission that rescued 12 boys and their soccer coach from a flooded Thailand cave system. Strict Covid-19 border rules were in place at the time, threatening to separate him from Centenera in Sydney. Then, two months into filming, Edgerton got the call that his children would be arriving early. “Lovely Ron has twins of his own, and the moment I realised the babies were coming out screaming and I had to get home, he said, ‘We’ll see you in eight days’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, thank you’ and left.
“In one of the first scenes back, [my character] was talking about the fact that anaesthetising the kids [to get them out of the cave] would most likely result in some of them dying,” he says. “And I was just so overwhelmed by that. I found it quite difficult to do a scene about the care and the life or death of children. I was trying not to be too emotional because I was filled up with all sorts of feelings at that point.”
Edgerton was a tow-headed 10-year-old when he dressed up in women’s clothes and took to the stage in front of his primary school peers in Dural, on the semi-rural outskirts of north-western Sydney. Diaphanous red harem pants and a skimpy bikini top, artificially plumped by a pair of tennis balls. “I don’t know why or how I accepted that this was a good idea,” he says now, “but I looked up to Nash and if Nash told me to do something I just did it.” It was Nash’s idea to perform a magic show with Joel as his fetching assistant, Jolene. Such was Edgerton’s self-possession and cool that he survived and thrived in the schoolyard bearpit despite being forever linked to the Dolly Parton classic.
Mother Marianne was a big fan of Death Wish-style revenge thrillers but baulked at watching them alone. “We were watching Charles Bronson movies probably when we were a bit too young,” Nash says. “Then dad [Michael, a lawyer] brought home a Betamax video camera and we started playing around with it in the backyard, making little films and stuff. We never did it thinking it was a real job or what we were going to do.”
The brothers’ 1980s film diet was dominated by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, by “muscle and brawn and machine guns and pistols”, Joel says. “The films were full of violence and I’m sure that made an impression on me in terms of the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. In fact, I recently found this story book I wrote for a class assignment and people got shot in every chapter and the title was Death Kill.” Death Kill? “Death Kill. Now don’t go stealing that title …”
Edgerton says he was drawn to acting because he liked the attention, “and I admit that when I was in high school there was a desire to be famous.” He pauses for a beat, then: “Be careful what you wish for,” he says. “This desire to be celebrated somehow in the public sphere for your work, I don’t know that anyone who achieves that would say that the feeling exactly matches up to what their desire for it was in the beginning.”
In Year 11, Edgerton saw the Arthur Miller play The Crucible at the Sydney Opera House and thought, “OK, I’m going to be a theatre actor,” he says. “My ambition never extended to working in movies and certainly not internationally. That sort of just evolved.” He enrolled at the now-defunct Theatre Nepean at the University of Western Sydney and, following a 1999 tour with Bell Shakespeare Company in Henry IV, became a household name by making the leap to TV with The Secret Life of Us. In the meantime, frustrated by the lack of decent movie opportunities, he formed Blue Tongue Films with Nash and filmmaker Kieran Darcy-Smith. The collective, named for the Edgertons’ childhood pet, has expanded to include Michôd and his wife Mirrah Foulkes, among others, and now regularly turns out weighty, commercially successful films.
Landing a bit part as Luke Skywalker’s foster father Owen Lars in the 2002 blockbuster Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones allowed Edgerton to bluff his way into Hollywood meetings “even though I’m only in it for five minutes”. (He recently reprised the role for the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.) Animal Kingdom kicked off the next phase of his career and it’s been accelerating since. He’s worked with actors such as Johnny Depp (Black Mass), Will Smith (Bright) and Jennifer Lawrence (Red Sparrow) and picked up a Golden Globe nomination for the 2016 interracial marriage drama Loving.
“I feel quite lucky in that I’m not debilitated or anything, but I feel anxiety about stuff, and I think it’s become slightly worse in these last few years, with the pandemic”
Since “Jolene”, playful roles have been thin on the ground. In general, Edgerton sticks to the dark end of the street. “It’s funny because I have quite a light demeanour for the most part,” he says. “Maybe it’s partly my film diet when I was growing up, but I’m more interested in suspense thrillers and drama, and the oddness that exists in some people’s psyches. I don’t really see myself doing action films or romantic comedies.”
A shame, friends say, because the one time he did visit the bright side of the road – as portly carouser Falstaff in Michôd’s 2019 historical drama The King – he nailed it. “There’s a cheekiness and a sense of fun to that character that is very much Joel,” says Nash. “Even though he’s playing a Shakespearean character and he put on a lot of weight for it, I saw a lot of my brother in that one.” It’s Michôd’s favourite performance, “mainly because it lets him be funny and messy. For all his masculinity and physicality and presence, Joel is actually very animated and funny, but he rarely if ever gets to be that in movies.”
Back in London, Edgerton is in a reflective mood. “What I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is the definition of masculinity,” he says. “Those early days going to drama school, it seemed like everybody wanted to be some version of Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, so the cliché of masculinity in my mind was about toughness, how hard-edged you are. As I get older, I understand that the definition of masculinity is very fluid, that it should and does encompass many aspects of stuff I’ve neglected before: softness and emotionality and sensitivity and all forms of sexuality as well. I don’t know why I lean away from those things. If I had a clearer understanding, or there was motivation behind it, I would tell you.” He’s impressed by new-generation actors such as Timothée Chalamet (his co-star in The King), Lucas Hedges (his co-star in Boy Erased) and even Harry Styles. “They have their own definition of masculinity in a much broader sense,” he says. “It feels healthier.”
Edgerton feels the time is right to embark on his next writing-directing project, “so we could be in one place for a whole year”, and is keenly aware his career decisions now impact a family. “I’ve never let geography or money dictate creative choices before, but there’s little elements of those things that creep in now.”
Anxiety has coloured Edgerton’s adult life but it’s only recently he’s decided to talk about it. “Obviously, there’s a stigma around talking about anything you think is a perceivable weakness,” he says. “And I don’t want to draw attention to myself by creating a sense of drama about what goes on inside my head. But I also realise that more of us should be able to talk about things when they’re not, you know, perfect.” He experienced his first panic attack a decade ago, toward the end of shooting The Great Gatsby, and was rushed to hospital, convinced he was having a heart attack. Walking the red carpet at film premieres, flashbulbs popping, people shouting, makes him particularly uneasy. “I feel quite lucky in that I’m not debilitated or anything, but I feel anxiety about stuff, and I think it’s become slightly worse in these last few years, with the pandemic.
“I’ve always had this impression that I must be an extroverted person, but it’s quite clear to me now that I’ve always been an introvert.” He employs “a sort of shield” when braving large social gatherings or promotional events. “Part of me is terrified to be around so many people, so I sort of have a way of performing that’ll get the job done.”
Edgerton first met Centenera in the early 2000s in Bondi, where the magazine and entertainment worlds glamorously intersect. He was starring in The Secret Life of Us; she was fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. It wasn’t until many years later that they struck up a friendship which, in 2018, turned into a romance. “She’s got impeccable taste in all things, not just clothes,” he says. “Just the way the house is looking and beyond that, on a human level, she has good opinions about things: ethics and social interactions. She just has good taste in terms of being a human being.”
The new parents are among those vanishingly rare celebrities who prefer to keep their private life private. There were no “baby bump” photos on social media. They never publicly confirmed they were expecting, and Edgerton’s “birth announcement” during an interview with Oprah Winfrey in May 2021 was light on details: he’d just come from the hospital; he was “in love”. The world has been kept in the dark about gender and it was unauthorised paparazzi photos that revealed the existence of twins. The couple don’t intend to release the babies’ names and ask that we don’t share them.
But suddenly here they are, toddling in to dad’s Zoom call. “Look, it’s the Purple People Eater,” Edgerton coos, lifting up a dark-haired little girl in a violet-striped onesie. This is Pebbles (not her real name). She and her much larger twin brother Bamm-Bamm (not his real name either) are both sporting topknots with bows, presumably affixed by their style maven mother but just as likely to have been clipped on by Joel because that’s who he is now. The twins are off to toddler dance class. “They’re going to get their music on,” he says. Pebbles waves a small rubber shoe shaped like a shark. “I won’t talk about them too much but, I mean, they’re just delightful,” he says. “They’ve got a good sense of humour, actually, and they’re at that stage where they’re bumping into furniture constantly.”
Edgerton’s life has been predictably upended, in unpredictable ways. “When you’re an actor everybody treats you as super special, so there’s the potential for you to get beguiled into thinking you’re really important,” he says. “I never really bought too many tickets to that parade, but you are number one on the call sheet and it’s easy to imagine how your life can become a little selfish. Then all of a sudden, no, no, no, you’re not the most important person here right now, at all.”
And won’t be for a while. “Oh yeah, that’s it for me,” he says cheerily. Parenthood asks a lot of a man. But he’s got a lot to give.
The Stranger is in cinemas on October 6 and streams on Netflix from October 19.