Joel Edgerton, our guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of an audience at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation in Los Angeles, is an outstanding Australian actor, writer, producer and director.
Edgerton first appeared on most people’s radar some 25 years ago, when he was cast by George Lucas to play Uncle Owen Lars in 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones and 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, a role he later reprised in the 2022 Disney+ limited series Obi-Wan Kenobi.
But he is now at least as well known for his raw and edgy performances in other projects — some made in tandem with a group of Australian family and friends under the banner of Blue-Tongue Films, such as 2010’s Animal Kingdom, and others made with the likes of Gavin O’Connor (2011’s Warrior), Kathryn Bigelow (2012’s Zero Dark Thirty), Baz Luhrmann (2013’s The Great Gatsby), Scott Cooper (2015’s Black Mass), Jeff Nichols (2016’s Midnight Special and Loving, the latter of which brought him Golden Globe and Critics Choice award nominations), Barry Jenkins (the 2021 limited series The Underground Railroad), Ron Howard (2022’s Thirteen Lives) and George Clooney (2023’s The Boys in the Boat).
He also wrote and directed two other films in which he appeared, 2015’s The Gift and 2018’s Boy Erased.
But never has Edgerton been better than he is in his most recent film, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, an adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name, which chronicles the life and times of Robert Grainier, an American laborer who was born in the late 19th century and lived well into the 20th, quietly experiencing love and loss along the way. Edgerton, with very few words of dialogue, gives an understated, beautiful, haunting performance for which he already has received best actor Critics Choice, Golden Globe and Spirit award nominations, and for which he may well soon receive his first Oscar nomination.
Over the course of this conversation, the 51-year-old discusses all of the above, plus much more.
