Joel Edger­ton: ​‘On a scale of 1 to 10 this project was Spinal Tap’

Hav­ing estab­lished him­self as a main­stay of both Aus­tralian and Amer­i­can cin­e­ma over the past two decades, Joel Edger­ton is now look­ing to build a rep­u­ta­tion behind the cam­era. As an actor Edger­ton has tend­ed to flit between Hol­ly­wood block­busters (the ear­ly 2000s Star Wars pre­quels, Exo­dus: Gods and Kings, Bright), cred­i­ble genre fare (The Thing, Mid­night Spe­cial, It Comes at Night) and char­ac­ter-dri­ven inde­pen­dent dra­ma (Ani­mal King­dom, Life, Lov­ing); he clear­ly prizes the lat­ter but is not above tak­ing a pay­cheque when the right oppor­tu­ni­ty comes along.

By con­trast, his path to becom­ing a direc­tor has so far seen Edger­ton adopt a more cau­tious, con­sid­ered approach. His first fea­ture was the smart sub­ur­ban thriller The Gift, which Edger­ton also wrote and starred in along­side Jason Bate­man and Rebec­ca Hall back in 2015. His sec­ond, Boy Erased, sees Edger­ton shift towards a more earnest mode of film­mak­ing. Based on the mem­oir of the same name by Gar­rard Con­ley (renamed Jared in the film, and played by Lucas Hedges) the film tells of a young man’s trou­bled jour­ney of self-dis­cov­ery via a church-spon­sored con­ver­sion ther­a­py programme.

In per­son Edger­ton exudes the same qui­et inten­si­ty that makes him such a com­pelling screen pres­ence – his cool, laid-back demeanour belie a dri­ve and a stee­li­ness which any direc­tor will tell you are essen­tial in a fick­le and unfor­giv­ing indus­try. Yet you also get a sense of some­one who under­stands the impor­tance of hav­ing a good sup­port net­work. That doesn’t sim­ply mean sur­round­ing your­self with tal­ent, but ensur­ing that the peo­ple you work with are hon­est, hard-work­ing and open to col­lab­o­ra­tion. It’s the rea­son Edger­ton was deter­mined to cast his com­pa­tri­ots Nicole Kid­man and Rus­sell Crowe in Boy Erased (although he’s quick to down­play the Aussie con­nec­tion), and why he val­ues his rela­tion­ship with his film­mak­er broth­er, Nash, above any other.

LWLies: What’s your first con­sid­er­a­tion when cast­ing a family?

Edger­ton: In the past I’ve always tak­en a lead from the way I’ve watched oth­er peo­ple do things. You need to start with the main char­ac­ter, and then build the cast out from there. Sim­i­lar­ly, if you’re cast­ing a mar­riage then you need to think who is the most impor­tant char­ac­ter to the film. And some­times that’s dri­ven by the busi­ness side of things: you need to find a star first. But in this case I want­ed to start with the cen­tral char­ac­ter of Jared.

I had my dream team in my head pret­ty ear­ly on. I knew I want­ed Lucas, and because I’d seen the fam­i­ly pho­tographs I knew that Rus­sell and Nicole were my first choic­es – not because they’re Aus­tralian, just because of how they resem­ble Garrad’s par­ents. I knew if I got Lucas then Nicole could be a per­fect moth­er to him, and if I’m lucky then maybe I can mar­ry her to Rus­sell. Luck­i­ly it all came togeth­er very well.

I was sur­prised to learn that Rus­sell and Nicole had nev­er worked togeth­er previously.

Yeah, I knew that but it is sur­pris­ing. What was real­ly good for me is that they both real­ly want­ed to [work togeth­er], so I knew the chances of get­ting them both was a real pos­si­bil­i­ty. And what I didn’t appre­ci­ate at first was just how ben­e­fi­cial hav­ing them both would be, because their rela­tion­ship has been so long­stand­ing – they’ve been friends since they were teenagers – that they would imme­di­ate­ly feel com­fort­able with each oth­er, and be in each other’s space in a way that would feel like they’d been mar­ried for a long time.

How much work­shop­ping do you tend to do with actors?

Not much to be hon­est with you. As an actor, I like to have a rehearsal peri­od, even if it’s just a week sit­ting around a table. Some­times it’s just a mat­ter of talk­ing through scenes and mak­ing sure you see eye to eye with a direc­tor, that there’s noth­ing that’s gonna be a sur­prise when you get on set. You need to agree what road you’re gonna go down. So you have a dis­cus­sion, talk about themes, talk about tone, and maybe work out why there might be some­thing miss­ing or not quite work­ing for an actor or a character.

For Boy Erased we didn’t have a lot of that. We had a fair bit of time with Lucas, and I could have indi­vid­ual con­ver­sa­tions, but essen­tial­ly we turned up each day with the ingre­di­ents for the scene and cooked it on the spot. Which is very excit­ing, espe­cial­ly when you’re work­ing with actors like Nicole and Rus­sell, and even Lucas who’s young but super sharp and knows what he’s doing. You don’t always need a rehearsal peri­od, but some­times it’s a good thing to have.

You want to make sure every­one is hap­py with the script, that kind of thing?

Exact­ly. When you write a script and cast an actor to play a part, you need to mar­ry the actor to the script. Some­times that means edit­ing the script in order to suit the actor. For exam­ple, when I made The Gift, the tem­plate I had in my mind for the char­ac­ter Jason Bate­man played was that he was a bul­ly because he had been a jock at school. But I realised, after I became fas­ci­nat­ed with the idea of cast­ing Jason, is that one way to be a bul­ly at school is not to just have mus­cle and brawn, but to be manip­u­la­tive and to have a very intel­li­gent brain, to be that per­son who can con­quer and divide. So it was about chang­ing the lev­el of intel­li­gence of that char­ac­ter to suit Jason.

When it came to cast­ing Nicole and Rus­sell, did the Aussie con­nec­tion help in any way?

I had met them both, but it wasn’t a case of just being able to pick up the phone, I had to go through the prop­er chan­nels. I was actu­al­ly a lit­tle bit ret­i­cent about cast­ing them both, just because I wor­ried peo­ple would think I just walked down the street and knocked on their door, you know. That wasn’t the case at all, it was real­ly about their resem­blance to the real parents.

We have a few Aus­tralians in the office, and there was some debate as to what your Aussie nick­name would be: ​‘Edge‑o’ or ​‘Edgy’?

‘Edge‑o’ most­ly. Ben Mendel­sohn calls me ​‘Joel-eo’. I’ve nev­er real­ly had one spe­cif­ic nick­name though. Actu­al­ly my niece gave me the coolest nick­name I’ve ever had: my broth­er calls me ​‘Bro’, and one day when she must must have been four or five, she turned to me and said, ​‘Hey, Uncle Bro…’ So now I’m ​‘Uncle Bro’. And I have anoth­er niece who’s three and now she’s start­ed call­ing me ​‘Uncle Bro’.

How much do you and your broth­er talk shop, even when you’re not work­ing on the same project?

Oh, all the time – I would say dai­ly. He’ll send me links to the next round of media spots for his next TV show, or yes­ter­day he was ask­ing me how press was going for this. He’ll send me stuff to read, or like recent­ly I sent him a book I think he’d be real­ly good to direct. I’m actu­al­ly think­ing now about com­bin­ing our strengths, because we’ve nev­er direct­ed any­thing togeth­er before. He’s so good at mov­ing the cam­era, he’s so good at action, and I real­ly love work­ing with actors, so I won­der if there’s a way we could team up and find the right project that’s big­ger-scale. I don’t know that I could han­dle [direct­ing] big car chas­es and shoot-outs and all that kin­da stuff.

He was behind the mon­i­tor a lot on Boy Erased when I was act­ing, and I’ve stayed on extra long on projects he’s done just to sort of pick up loose scenes that he doesn’t have time to shoot. So we’re always doing that any­way. It’d be inter­est­ing to sit behind the mon­i­tor all day long togeth­er and build some­thing properly.

Are you keen to direct more films generally?

Oh yeah. Thing is, to get on board as an actor it’s gonna take maybe a sev­en or eight out of 10 to piqué my inter­est; it may not be my dream project but there’s enough in it that I want to be involved. Maybe it’s the direc­tor plus an actor who’s involved plus I get to go to a coun­try I’ve nev­er been to. It might give me enough mon­ey that I can then squir­rel away and work on that oth­er thing that maybe isn’t going to pay as well.

But as a direc­tor I’ve realised that I can’t just read anoth­er person’s script that’s I relat­ed to on a sev­en or eight out of 10, and then square away two years of my life to do it. I need to be almost so obsessed with it – on a scale of 10 it’s got to be ​‘Spinal Tap’. That’s what Boy Erased was for me. I’d nev­er thought about turn­ing a book into a film, but when I read Garrrad’s mem­oir it start­ed it became this point of obses­sion for me. So I’m wait­ing for that next thing to get under my skin.

And you’ve recent­ly been work­ing with David Michôd on his new film The King. What can we expect from that?

Well I hope some­thing real­ly won­der­ful. It was a big thing for us because we’ve made movies before – I shot his very first short film which was a crew of like 20 peo­ple – and there we were lit­er­al­ly two or three months ago in Budapest in a field shoot­ing the Bat­tle of Agin­court with 200 armoured men and 80 hors­es and a mas­sive infra­struc­ture. It felt kind of sur­re­al that some­one had let us do that. It’s gonna be epic. But it’s also very dra­mat­ic and per­son­al and hope­ful­ly emo­tion­al as well. You know, it’s not Shake­speare, but it’s about that king, it’s about Hen­ry V and his evo­lu­tion and the con­quer­ing of France.

What do you love abut movies?

What do I love about movies… Movies for me are a bit of a hol­i­day from life. It’s a nice diver­sion from life. For me, whether I’m writ­ing or direct­ing or act­ing in a movie, it’s a com­plete avoid­ance of my own per­son­al life. I real­ly like when movies move me.

Boy Erased is released 8 Feb­ru­ary. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.