Joel Edgerton is, by his own admission, not what you’d call a bookworm. If the 51-year-old is sitting down to read anything, it’s probably going to be for work. Edgerton is lucky enough to have been in demand as an actor for decades, first on Australian TV and then in everything from Star Wars prequels to indie character studies, and he’s usually involved in one in-progress project or another as a writer, director and/or producer as well. He’s a busy guy. Those screenplays piled up on his desk aren’t going to read themselves. Besides, bookstores intimidate him. Too many choices.
But Edgerton is also a firm believer that the universe has an odd sense of humor and a way of nudging the right things toward you at the right time. And if a person takes the time to gift you a specific book, there’s usually a reason, even if it doesn’t become apparent right away. So when someone handed him a copy of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella Train Dreams right after Edgerton wrapped production on his 2018 family drama Boy Erased, he felt compelled to carve out time for it. “You often give someone a book because you think they might find something within it that has some meaning for them,” he says, early one November morning while peering out of the Mandarin Hotel’s windows on the 35th floor. “Besides, a novella obviously makes a great gift. It’s short.”
Edgerton cracked it open the next day, and was immediately taken by the story of Robert Granier, a migrant laborer working the land in the early part of the 20th century. There was nothing particularly spectacular or unique about this character who chopped down trees and laid down railroad tracks in the American west; he was just another everyman who toiled away at building our country, one callous at a time. Granier never slew dragons, led armies into battles, blew up Death Stars. He simply lived, loved, lost, and died. The end. And in this deceptively straightforward story, Edgerton witnessed a whole other world. He recognized a frontier life that resembled his upbringing in northwest Sydney, in a rural area right on the edge of a national park. He saw his grandfather, and his father, and a generation of stoic man who said little and somehow contained multitudes.
“I just loved it,” Edgerton says. “The book said something to me, and I don’t exactly know why, except that it felt like….” He searches for the right words, his hands moving around the air before finally resting them on the table in front of him. Then the actor settles and suddenly switches tracks. “I say this about our film: I don’t think it gives you the meaning of life at all. But I think it gets close to discussing good questions around: What is the meaning of our lives?”
A film festival favorite that finally drops on Netflix this weekend, Train Dreams brings Johnson’s novella to the screen, following Granier as he goes from one breathtaking natural vista to the next. He meets a woman named Gladys, played by Felicity Jones, builds a cabin in the woods and starts a family. The logger and railsplitter occasionally encounters American eccentrics, like a chatty drifter prone to sporting bible verses and an old coot of a demolitions expert with a philosophical bent. Granier witnesses things both beautiful and horrific, experiences both a sense of peace and endures a great tragedy. It’s arguably the defining performance of a career blessed with several compelling lead roles (Loving, Warrior, Master Gardener) and more than its share of solid supporting turns (Animal Kingdom, Black Mass, Zero Dark Thirty). And as played by Edgerton, this rugged individual exemplifies the idea that just because someone’s the strong, silent type doesn’t mean they don’t have a rich inner life.
About the book: Edgerton was so in love with Johnson’s vision of an America transitioning from untamed wilderness to modernity — a story he felt was somehow “both cinematic and dangerous” on the page despite being a rather elliptical character study — that he set out to get the rights shortly after he finished reading it. It turns out they were already taken. Edgerton admits to being a little heartbroken, given that it was the first book he’d read for pleasure in a long time and had fallen under the sway of this everyman living a modest life occasionally interrupted by prejudice, progress and history. He had to push aside and move on, because there were other movies to make. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.
Then two major things happened over the next five years: Edgerton became a father, giving birth to twins. And Clint Bentley reached out to him. Bentley was a filmmaker who, along with his cowriter and creative partner Greg Kwedar, had been slowly building a reputation as someone to watch. Jockey, his 2021 drama about a professional horse rider gunning for one last win, was an intimate, actor-centric indie that contained a number of autobiographical details; Sing Sing, which Bentley cowrote and Kwedar directed, focused on a theater program in prison and earned Colman Domingo an Oscar nomination. He was a big fan of Edgerton’s work, and when he and Kwedar were making shorts in and around Austin, Texas, Bentley considered the work of Blue Tongue, the Australian filmmaking collective that Joel and his brother Nash Edgerton cofounded in the early 2000s, to be a big inspiration.
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It turned out that Bentley had secured the rights to Train Dreams. He and Kwedar had a script ready to go, and though he had no idea that Edgerton had attempted to develop the book as a project, he wanted him to play Granier. “We’d written this role that required someone who could have believably been a logger and also seemed comfortable burping a baby,” Bentley says. “Someone who was highly physical, was the right age, and yet could be like a silent-film actor, where they’re giving you a lot with little. In other words, we’d set ourselves for something impossible. But it wouldn’t have been impossible for this one actor….”
Bentley tentatively reached out to Edgerton and flew to Chicago, where the actor was filming the Apple TV show Dark Matter. When he mentioned that he was working on Train Dreams, Edgerton was flabbergasted. He was also scared, however, because now that he was a dad, the fear that something would happen to your family took on a very real resonance to him. And without giving too much away, that fear is also something that Granier must reckon with. “We had a challenging time leading up to the birth of our kids, which lead to a lot of Google-search paranoia,” Edgerton notes. “They’re fine and wonderful and healthy, but when that fear gets carved into you as a new father? It never goes away. And the idea of having to dive into that part of the story after that…” He lets the sentence hang.
But the more Edgerton and Bentley, who had also recently become a dad for the first time, talked about the book, and their kids, and their dads, the more Edgerton realized he had to do it. In fact, it was because he’d become a father, and understood first-hand both the unconditional love you have for your offspring and the sense that anything that might happen to them would be devastating, that Joel felt a connection to Granier in an even deeper way than before. It was almost like he’d been made to wait for this opportunity on purpose. “When I got home from the meeting, I told my wife about the project and the book,” Edgerton says. “I mentioned that I was unsure, and kinda afraid of doing it now. And my wife, who doesn’t like to be unplugged from big cities because of her work, just looked at me and went, ‘So I guess we’re all going to Spokane. How long will we be there?’ She knew before I did.”
“Maybe Joel couldn’t have done it without being a father,” Bentley muses. “But I can tell you that I couldn’t have done the movie without him. I think it changed him. It changed all of us.”
“Transformative” is a word that comes a lot when Edgerton talks about Train Dreams. In his early days, he says he was determined to emulate the type of actors he admired — the kind who tended to disappear into characters. He also noted that, in his personal life, he’d grown up watching movies that emphasized a certain type of macho bravado. “The movies, to me, were Stallone and Schwarzenegger — if we’re talking about cinema’s depiction of masculinity, that’s what I saw,” Edgerton admits. “Those are the examples you’re given. So I always sort of had a kind of simplistic view of what the definition of masculinity was. It’s toughness. Tough guys had the answers to everything.”
Look at a lot of roles that Edgerton was cast in during the first part of his career, and you’ll see a lot of cops, crooks, soldiers, brawlers and strong, silent types. Some talk loudly and carry a big stick. Some simply let the stick do the talking for them. He knew how to add nuance to characters like the MMA fighter in Warrior (2011), and his portrayal of Richard Loving, a bricklayer who found himself in the middle of the fight to recognize interracial marriage, in Loving (2016) proved that he could play someone restrained. But Edgerton was a handsome, burly Aussie with a square jaw and broad shoulders, and he was good at playing tough guys. Add in the fact that he and his fellow Blue Tongue colleagues favored the sort of genre movies that required a certain type of big, bold style of acting, and you can see why he fit a certain mold.
As he got older, however, Edgerton began to take note of a different type of fellow actor, the kind that, in his words, “who were just sort of opening up their chest and being honest and not pulling tricks and hiding behind, you know, layers of things. Train Dreams was that for me, because of my experience with my life. There were things I was bringing to this where I thought, Oh, maybe I don’t try to hide behind anything. Maybe I bring the actual fear and pain to this role, and I have the confidence to just sit in it and not pull out any tricks.”
He says he still likes roles that let him go big — Edgerton mentions that he just played a larger-than-life inmate in an upcoming prison drama, where he “turned it up to an 11.5 out of 10” — but that playing Granier has allowed him to fully access a side of himself as an actor that he’d only flirted with before. He feels he can be more “open” onscreen after this. And Train Dreams has helped Edgerton further a sense of personal growth that began with him becoming a parent, in which he began to think about what being a man actually meant.
“There’s always this idea that you have to live up to that ‘toughness’ ideal,” Edgerton says. “But now I realize — and you might feel this too — we’re just sort of silvering, bearded, grown-up boys who just happen to look like older men.” He lets out a boisterous laughs. “We’re still fucking working it out! We still don’t have answers, and we’re still trying to reach understanding and express ourselves. Playing Robert made me think about this. These were men who couldn’t express themselves emotionally because of the time they lived in. What’s our excuse?
“You know, masculinity — it’s a word I feel like should almost be thrown out, lest it be sort of misinterpreted in some way,” he continues. “Because I think we still think it’s a word that means one thing, and it should mean a lot more. Look what it’s done to this country. It’s cracked it in two. one side thinks the other person’s view is weak, is too frilly and garnished and adorned. And then that side thinks the other people living in an ancient world, that it’s brutality versus sensitivity. But it has got to be both.” Edgerton pauses. “Even Clint Eastwood needs a cuddle. I want to see Clint Eastwood have a cuddle!”
He likes that Robert Granier allowed him to do that. He likes that Bentley saw that in him, even before he himself did, and encouraged him to lean into it. And he likes that Train Dreams managed to tap into the very thing that moved him when he first read it years ago: the idea that no matter who you are, you have a story worth telling.
“Those different story templates of an ordinary person doing an extraordinary thing — or the opposite of that, the extraordinary person, kind of stooping to the ordinary, like the king humbling themselves or the peasant finding realizing they’re actually a prince — this is even different from all that. Robert’s ordinariness doesn’t change. Instead, the film honors the extraordinary nature of life itself.
“And that, to me, is a special thing to see on screen,” Edgerton adds, “because I do believe more than 90 percent of us see ourselves as insignificant, soon to be forgotten, people on the inner grind of some kind, whether we go to an office or whether we chop down trees. And I love that the movie looks at people like our parents and grandparents, that generation of men — no one’s going to build a statue in their honor. But they were significant people. Everyone makes their mark in some way.”
From Rolling Stone US
