NEW YORK — Joel Edgerton is a talker. It’s not just the volume of words, but the quality. Rich, descriptive paragraphs pour forth from him as if he were writing novellas in the air.
This, of course, makes it a little curious that he’s getting the best reviews of his career for playing a hermit.
“The only way to shut me up is to film me,” the 51-year-old actor-writer-director tells me, laughing, as he leans back in his chair and looks out at a spectacular view of Central Park from the 35th-floor restaurant of Manhattan’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.
“Rolling! Finally, he’s shutting up!” he says, cracking up now as he imitates, I’m guessing, every exasperated director who’s worked with him. “It’s weird. I don’t think I’m that funny, but I’m far funnier in life — more gregarious, more verbal than a lot of characters I play on screen.”
On this gray, late-October morning, he’s been talking up a tear, and is already two coffees and several interviews deep on a relentless publicity schedule for “Train Dreams,” a gorgeous and deeply moving story of one man’s life and tragedies as a logger in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century — from the laying down of railroad tracks to the advent of the airplane. (The Oscar contender is now streaming on Netflix, but see it on a big screen if possible.)
Edgerton is in nearly every frame, and seems to be tapping into a kind of male movie star we’ve lost. The film, based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, is told largely through narration, as if over a campfire. As Robert Grainier, a man who spends months at a time away from his wife (Felicity Jones) and baby daughter cutting down trees and witnessing history, Edgerton rarely speaks but communicates a universe of emotion. It’s a powerhouse performance, viscerally evocative of Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Clint Eastwood — of a man so in touch with his pain that to express it would mean to disintegrate under the weight of it.
“My understanding of what a man is, or the definition of masculinity, has changed so much over the years,” Edgerton tells me. “It’s almost that the word is useless. I think the misconception of masculinity is that it’s all of a harder edge … identifying with strength and strength only, rather than tenderness and softness. You know, violence versus kindness, these supercharged kind of opposites.”
Now, he says, “I’d like to think that masculinity holds a lot more softness than it used to in my mind.” He’s realized that the actors who once shaped his image of what a man is (including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone) were actually willing to show their tenderness. Underneath, he says, you can see the boy that each of them once was, “and I think that’s really important.”
Edgerton looks like a grown-up boy himself, or at least a stylish Ted Lasso, in a bright red cotton track jacket, seersucker chinos and Onitsuka Tiger sneakers. He wears an Oura ring and a wedding band on his left hand.
“When my wife’s not around, I get to go rogue,” he says, upon my jokingly asking who in the world dressed him. In 2018, he married Christine Centenera, now editor in chief of Vogue Australia, whom he’d known for 20 years. They have twin 4-year-old boys and split their time between London and Sydney.
Edgerton started thinking about “Train Dreams” seven years ago when someone gave him Johnson’s novella as a gift and he was so taken that he tried to get the rights to adapt it. When he couldn’t, he put it out of his head — until director Clint Bentley (part of the creative duo behind 2024’s “Sing Sing”) approached him in 2022. “It did feel sort of strange,” says Edgerton, “like, how does this guy know that I love this book so much?”
Bentley had been a fan of Edgerton’s for years, but he had a feeling he hadn’t been offered enough roles that showed his range and depth.
“And you’ve got a film that, like, lives and dies by its lead,” says Bentley. “I just thought he had some of these paradoxes — like you could believe he’s tough and a very masculine figure out cutting logs, but then also this tenderness and sweetness that you could believe he could be holding a baby.” During postproduction, Bentley says, he actually pulled out a lot of explanatory voice-over because what Edgerton was expressing was far richer.
A handsome chameleon, Edgerton is the kind of actor most people recognize but can’t quite place. If they do clock him, it’s probably as the guy who played Luke Skywalker’s uncle, young Owen Lars, in two of the “Star Wars” prequels and the Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series for Disney+.
He’s not a big guy, but whatever a camera does to other people, with him it seems to add 15 pounds of muscle and at least half a foot of height. In his early days, he was an ensemble member who often played bruisers with a short fuse, the kinds of crooks, cops and soldiers you wouldn’t want to cross at a bar fight in the Outback. But he’s always had a huge deal of vulnerability under that ultramasculine exterior.
He’d become a father in between reading the book and meeting Bentley, and the pregnancy hadn’t been easy. The fear he’d felt, he says, helped deepen his connection with Robert’s sense of loss. “Just before our kids were born, I was so scared that they wouldn’t be okay, and then they were born and they were so tiny,” he says. “And now my biggest fear, as soon as my kids entered the world, is, ‘What if something were to happen?’… I’ll never lose that feeling.”
When he tried to explain to his wife what the movie was about, he says, he couldn’t even get out the words.
Edgerton considers “Train Dreams” the most personal thing he’s ever done. In many ways, he was living through his own fears and experiences on the screen, which he says allowed him to be patient and unafraid of the silence. “I was like, ‘All right, well if I think these things for real, then the camera will find that out,’” he says.
Robert’s story reminded Edgerton of his own upbringing in Australia. All the men in his family, for generations, had been sheep farmers. His grandfather also, in his more mature years, drove an electric train. On another timeline, Edgerton probably would be doing the same.
As the family lore goes, his father was heading to university to study sheep husbandry (“Which always made me laugh as a kid: ‘You’re gonna marry a sheep?!’”). But on the first day of enrollment, he ran into some buddies who convinced him that going into law was where the money was.
“It was sort of a pivotal moment, where suddenly my father steered us to a new direction,” says Edgerton. But he still grew up surrounded by nature — raised in an untamed section of New South Wales outside Sydney, “a wild and woolly place” where they didn’t have a street address.
His first big role outside of Australia was in 2005’s “Kinky Boots” as the reluctant heir to a British shoe factory who teams up with Chiwetel Ejiofor’s drag queen to launch a line of fabulous leather platform stompers. He’s gone toe-to-toe with Leonardo DiCaprio as Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby”; played a Navy SEAL in “Zero Dark Thirty”; and bulked up as a reluctant MMA fighter who has to take on his brother (Tom Hardy) in “Warrior.”
In the indie film world, though, he’s something of a legend. He and his older brother Nash, a stuntman and director, are part of the Australian collective Blue-Tongue Films, known for gritty, dark, psychologically terrifying fare, including 2010’s “Animal Kingdom,” a propulsive thriller with Edgerton as the head of a crime family that took Sundance by storm. The night of that premiere wasn’t the only time I’d seen the low-key and expansively friendly Edgerton boys pouring out of a Sundance bar with journalists, festival volunteers and a gaggle of Aussies well after last call.
Joel’s role had been small, but his association with that movie became a kind of calling card, of a twisted, shockingly violent sensibility. One can trace a line straight from that film to his directorial debut, the 2015 psychological thriller “The Gift,” which he also wrote, about the pernicious consequences of high school bullying. Edgerton gave himself the role of the psycho stalker.
“Train Dreams” seems to be his launch into a new echelon, his first lead role to use the full range of his emotional faculties since 2016’s “Loving,” based on the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. With quiet, steadfast resolve, he played a rural bricklayer weathering a storm of racism and national attention to fight for his right to marry the woman he loved (played by Ruth Negga) — and got his first and only Golden Globe nomination.
For “Train Dreams,” Bentley says he was looking for someone who wouldn’t fall into a brooding cowboy-hero stereotype who’s quiet because he feels nothing: “I wanted to represent this man from a certain generation who didn’t have the vocabulary to express what was going on inside him, yet was still trying to wrestle and figure that out.”
As he gets older, Edgerton tells me, he has less interest in characters who see ambition as the most important thing in the world. The movie, he says, resonated with him because “it celebrates ordinariness, celebrates all the people that think that they’re a little bit insignificant and that they’re not holding the remote control of life.”
Robert’s silence, he says, reminded him of stories he’d heard of old movie stars who’d get a script and “start running a Biro [pen] through lines of dialogue: ‘You don’t need to say that, don’t need to say that.’” Gene Hackman, he recently heard, would cross things out and put in brackets that read, “I can act that.”
His father had been very quiet, and Edgerton always wished he could be more like that. “They’re more mysterious and, more than that, when they speak, you want to listen because words are like currency to them,” he says.
The moment he probably related to most was when Robert doesn’t know how to start a chainsaw and feels like modernization has left him behind. “That’s me if you ask me to make a TikTok video or use ChatGPT,” says Edgerton. “Robert staring at chainsaws is like us staring at AI, going, ‘What is this thing going to do and how is it going to change our lives?’”
Since he became the father of boys, Edgerton has been thinking a lot about toxic masculinity. His other movie this year is “The Plague,” a psychological thriller set at a boys’ water polo camp. It’s the directorial debut of Charlie Polinger, who based it on the hazing he’d experienced in his adolescence. Edgerton plays the utterly ineffectual coach of a group of ruthless 12-year-olds who’ve ostracized another kid by saying he has “the plague” and that anyone who touches him will get it, too.
Edgerton hasn’t worked with a first-time director in years, but he’d seen Polinger’s shorts and been impressed, and signed on because at this point he wants to use his name to help the films he wants to see get made. “That movie, to me, is like ‘Full Metal Jacket’ for 12-year-olds — the dorm-room aspect of it all, and the cruelty,” Edgerton says.
The themes reminded him of “The Gift,” which he says “has a similar exploration of cruelty versus kindness at that formative age, and how do you live in the world and be good, but also not feel ostracized.”
If “The Plague” is a terrifying portrait of boyhood, perhaps “Train Dreams” is a testament to the value of a life, no matter how ordinary, spent turning away from prejudice, and toward love, family, the pursuit of dignity and the desire to help others do the same.
“I think one of the biggest problems with men and kids in general, maybe, is what cues are they given in the world?” Edgerton says. He and his wife can teach the twins how to be kind and empathetic, “but they’re not the only cues they’re going to get, because they’ll get them from school and work, when they get a job.”
He continues: “How do you show them a good representation of what you’d like them to be,” he says, “and hope that it sticks?”
Perhaps the only cue that matters is to live as you want them to live. And it can’t hurt if you’re doing it on a movie screen in an “incredibly hopeful” film. “Robert is able to look back at all those experiences, good or bad,” Edgerton says, “and the idea that he’s okay with it all is very special to me.”
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