Peter Sarsgaard is the embodiment of every bookish teenage girl’s dream date.
As David in An Education, he’s dashing, suave and the driver of a
fantastically cool Bristol sports car. He’s a cultivated and utterly
desirable step up in the world for 16-year-old swot Jenny (Carey Mulligan).
But — and this is what Sarsgaard does so brilliantly in many of the
characters he plays — from the very beginning there is something almost
imperceptibly wrong with David, one note that strikes slightly off key.
Having fallen headlong for him just as Jenny does, the audience finds itself
making excuses for him. With its masterclass in seductive creepiness from
Sarsgaard and a gale-force charm onslaught from the terrific newcomer
Mulligan, this is surely a performance-driven film. But Sarsgaard is having
none of it.
“I’m sensible about what I do. I believe that films are made by directors,
editors and writers. Not so much actors.” For a widely respected actor with
a string of highly acclaimed and frequently unsettling performances to his
name, Sarsgaard is not one to talk up the mystique of his profession.
He continues, in the eloquently precise drawl that has drawn comparisons with
John Malkovich. “I believe that an editor can determine the fate of a movie
more than an actor could. I think that you can edit around a bad performance
and make them look good enough to have the movie work. You can get around a
bad actor. You can’t get around a bad editor, and I don’t think you can get
around a bad director.” If it sounds as though Sarsgaard is being
self-deprecating, that’s not the case. He is not the type to brag, but he is
quietly confident of his own abilities. “I believe in my voice, I believe I
am talented.”
It’s just that he is an intelligent pair of eyes with a front-row seat from
which to view the industry and the ridiculousness of the celeb-powered
Hollywood model of film-making. It’s a model, he predicts, that has had its
day.
“Ultimately the branding of movies with actors is something that we’re going
to look back on as very 20th century. If you look at the way that movies are
going those types of movies are going to become the standard fare and it
will not matter if Mel Gibson is in it.” So there you have it – the end of
the star system as we know it, as predicted by a man who has had more
first-hand experience of it than most.
Although the natural Sarsgaard habitat is films such as Kinsey, Boys Don’t
Cry, Garden State and his latest, An Education — sharp-witted, sometimes
provocative quality independents — he has had supporting roles in a few big
studio pictures along the way. Kathryn Bigelow’s K19: The Widowmaker was
one; co-starring with Jodie Foster in Flightplan was another. But it is
through his wife, the Dark Knight star Maggie Gyllenhaal, and brother-in-law
Jake Gyllenhaal, that Sarsgaard has witnessed the movie-star existence at
its craziest. After their daughter Ramona was born in 2006, the family was
forced to move out of their home in Manhattan’s West Village to a quieter
Brooklyn neighbourhood because of the intensity of paparazzi interest. “It
was a big problem. We walked out of the door to go to the hospital to have
the baby and there were 20 photographers standing there, while Maggie was
7cm dilated and having to climb into a car. I had the good sense to put
sunglasses on her.”
But worse was yet to come. “For me, I really don’t mind. If I’m walking down
the street with Maggie we get photographed as a couple. It probably makes me
more marketable to be in US Weekly than not. But if my child is with me, it
just makes me furious.” When his daughter was still a baby, Sarsgaard was
walking in the street with her in a pushchair. Because the child was
sleeping, he had covered the front of the pushchair. A paparazzo barged
over, flipped back the cover from the pushchair, stuck his camera in and
started snapping pictures of the baby. In circumstances like these, how do
you stop yourself from hitting the photographer? “You don’t. Then of course
he could sue me if he wanted. But if you walked up to any other man who was
walking down the street with a stroller and you stuck a camera in and
started taking photographs of the baby, 90 per cent of New Yorkers, the
guys, would beat the ever-living shit out of you. But, of course, if you’re
an actor and you do that you’re going to end up paying someone $150,000.”
He’s laughing incredulously as he recounts the horror stories but you sense
that the paparazzi joke has worn a little thin. I’ll just leave my
camera-phone in my bag then.
Even so, Sarsgaard is candid about the treacherous lure that Hollywood exerts.
Would he want to be fully part of it? “If I could keep my soul,” he laughs.
“But it’s very tempting and very difficult to do that. So perhaps the reason
I am half in and half out is because I’m not fully confident that I could be
all the way in and still stay strong. Certain actors do that amazingly well.
Someone asked me if I would ever want to be the lead in an action movie. And
I said if I could be like Russell Crowe in Gladiator, who physically and
creatively is completely at odds with everything that Hollywood has to
offer, but he does it with so much conviction.”
Sarsgaard has a few words of caution for Mulligan, his 24-year-old co-star in
An Education, who is widely tipped for great things after her beguiling
performance. “It will be hard for an actress her age. I feel like the roles
are very dumbed-down. For actresses, the roles get good when you are 30. I
think she’ll be in Hollywood for a few years. That’s not a bad thing, it’s
just that to stay yourself and be powerful in Hollywood requires
unimaginable fortitude.”
Born on an Air Force base in Illinois, Sarsgaard moved many times as his
family followed his father’s work. But he denies that he got the performing
bug early on, as a coping strategy to fit in with each new set of
classmates. “I was a quiet, non-show-offy kid.” Instead, he was drawn to
acting only after he had had to relinquish his first ambition — to be a
soccer player. “I got too many concussions. You come in for a diving header
and there is a chance that you will head the ball into the goal post. I did
that once horribly. Seizure, concussion, memory loss.” Football is still a
passion, though. “I would probably support Liverpool but that’s just because
their two best players are from there. That makes it like a team for me.”
An Education is based on a memoir by the journalist Lynn Barber about a
schoolgirl romance with a man in his thirties. But Sarsgaard’s character
David is rather more sympathetically portrayed in the film than he is in
Barber’s writing. He chose not to read the original material. “I didn’t want
to. If you imagine Carey Mulligan’s character writing an article later on
about that experience, she would not be very kind to him. That’s why I
didn’t read the piece, because I didn’t want a person who had been jilted, I
didn’t want that perspective. I thought it would be meaningless. I have done
a lot of movies that were based on real people. And I have learnt that what
really happened, according to the people involved, is not usually that
interesting or helpful.”
What did interest Sarsgaard was the period of British history in which the
film is set. In the early 1960s, the repressive choke of 1950s propriety
still had a hold, but the promise of sexual and social liberation was just
round the corner. “It feels like a very pregnant time. That’s what drew me
to the movie. Nick [Hornby, the screenwriter] is like an encyclopaedia. He
knows all sorts of things in a really detailed way, so it’s not just history
but felt history.”
Sarsgaard and his family have been living in London since April while
Gyllenhaal shoots her latest film, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang. “I
have got to be with my daughter in a way that I feel very few fathers do.
Absolutely every day, breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime, since April.” And
his daughter is a fan of Nanny McPhee.
“She has met both Nanny McPhee and Emma Thompson. And she understands that
it’s all pretend. She knows we do things over and over. Like there was a
line that she kept repeating over and over because she saw her mum do it
over and over. ‘Children, what have you done?’ So sweet.”
An Education will be shown on Oct 20 at 8.30pm in Vue5 and at 8.45 in Vue7,
and on Oct 21 at 3.30pm and Oct 22 at 1pm, Vue5. The film goes on general
release on Oct 30
Age-gap romances
The Graduate (1967) The original cougar, Mrs Robinson alleviates the ennui of
being an affluent suburban housewife by toying with gauche Benjamin
Braddock.
American Beauty (1999) Kevin Spacey stars as Lester Burnham, marooned in his
office job, plunging into a midlife crisis and infatuated with Mena Suvari’s
nubile schoolgirl.
Gigi (1958) Leslie Caron is the teenage courtesan in training who captures the
heart of a playboy in this, surely the creepiest musical ever made.
Harold and Maude (1971) Morbid teenager Harold strikes up a platonic
friendship with funeral crasher Maude (age 79). His parents are not pleased.
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