He certainly looks the part.
When Joel Edgerton walks into the Vogue studio, a ripple runs through the air. Just back from Pittsburgh, where he’s been shooting the martial arts action movie Warrior with Nick Nolte, the actor is in top form to play red-blooded brute Stanley Kowalski opposite Cate Blanchett’s Blanche DuBois in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
He also has a bit of a swagger. But then he can afford to. The actor, who fi rst came to our attention as Will in the Gen X television drama The Secret Life of Us and followed it up with starring roles in Ned Kelly, The Night We Called it a Day, King Arthur, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and Kinky Boots, is at the top of his game.
Since the success of The Square, last year’s acclaimed drama cowritten by Edgerton and directed by his brother Nash, he has packed in back-to-back roles in Animal Kingdom, The Waiting City and Separation City, a return to the small screen in ABC’s Dirt Game, a voice-over part in the Australian stop-motion animation $9.99 and his short-film directorial debut, The List. Then there’s the big-budget Warrior and now Streetcar, which will travel to Washington and New York later this year.
“The only thing I have
that gives me the momentum
I really enjoy
is creating my own thing”
Although rehearsals have only just begun when we speak, he is very excited about the theatre production, and about working with Blanchett. “She’s without a doubt one of the best actresses ever,” he says firmly. “I really think she is up there rubbing shoulders with Meryl Streep [and] Judi Dench.” He adds: “Good actors only make each other better, I think, so I am really looking forward to working with her, because she’s so good that hopefully she’ll just make me better.”
He’s also excited about working with the director Liv Ullmann. “Being an actress herself, she really admires actors and respects what they do,” he says. “She really cares about the play and I think she has got a great group of actors together.”
The admiration is mutual. Ullmann says he won the part with his vulnerability as well as his strength. “He is brave enough to show us what we did not know about Stanley and himself,” she says.
It will be interesting to see his take on Stanley Kowalski. The iconic role is synonymous with Marlon Brando, who starred in both the Broadway and original big-screen version. Edgerton knows there will be comparisons. “It’s kind of a delicate and nice balance between enjoying the fact that the fame and the history of the play makes the whole situation a little bit more dangerous and exciting for all of us, and it helps publicise the play,” he says, “and the negative side [that] I almost wish I could erase, which is any kind of parallel or comparison with the way he played the role and with any male that attempts to play that part.”
It is a challenging role. Brando famously said he disliked the violent, menacing Kowalski and Edgerton agrees. “If you wanted to write a recipe for a bad guy, all of his actions do amount to a nice concoction of that.” It’s unlike any role he has played before. “I realise that a lot of the characters that I play have a lot of consideration for everyone else around them. [They] do operate in a real, limited social world. If they say something bad, they go into damage control, if they upset somebody, they are always trying to fix things. It’s really great to play a character who has almost no social regard for anything,” he says. “To have disregard as a character is very interesting [and] very freeing. You can get away with so much.”
But for all his masculinity, Edgerton isn’t a Stanley Kowalski-type character. He comes across as funny and self-effacing, polite and professional. He holds the door open for the girls on the shoot and laughs with the guys. And as hot as he is right now, he’s not taking his success for granted.
He remembers a similar winning streak in 2006, just before things went quiet. “I thought that I was on this run, I had been doing a lot of films back to back and then all of a sudden I was doing nothing,” he says. “And then I wrote a script and came back to Australia and did a bit of work here, and kind of realised that I wasn’t all that important.”
Being proactive is the key for him. “The choice to create stuff means that it can open up a whole world to you. Every story that has been told has been created by someone, so why just be a pawn, why just be a worker bee? Why not be the person who is creating the thing, especially if you’ve got stories to tell? I believe that every actor essentially is a storyteller, and you should be able to tell stories in any number of ways.”
“He is brave enough
to show us what we did not know
about Stanley and himself,”
He thoroughly enjoyed writing The Square and has just finished another screenplay. “With almost nothing, you can create the most expensive scene in the world, or the most dramatic environment, and no-one can tell you not to. Until a director or a producer looks at a script, until that moment, you have absolute freedom to do anything you want.”
He also wants to direct more – eventually. “I don’t want to be the person that goes: ‘Right, I’m going to make a feature film now because I deserve it.’ It’s a big step and telling a short-form story is not necessarily a sign that you could sustain a film for an hour and a half, two hours. Sometimes the best short-filmmakers fall apart once they get their feature fi lm off the ground,” he says. “And I don’t want to go through that stress. If I make a film I want to be incredibly well prepared.”
And while he doesn’t have anything confirmed for next year as yet, he would be quite happy if things settled down. “There are times when you are creating stuff, and when you go: ‘Oh no, I’m working so much now, I’ll stop creating for a while.’ Then it stops and you say: ‘Okay the only thing I have that gives me the momentum I really enjoy is creating my own thing.’ So to realise that you are not all that important, you are not that special, in a good way, really helps to remind yourself to keep working hard and stay good to yourself and stay good to other people and seek out the things that are going to make you happy.”
Published in Vogue Australia October 2009
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