Peter
Sarsgaard is quietly piling up an impressive list of acclaimed performances.
The versatile young actor first garnered raves for his disturbing turn as
Hillary Swank’s tormenter in BOYS DON’T CRY, and subsequent roles in SHATTERED
GLASS, GARDEN STATE and KINSEY have firmly established him as one of the most
promising actors of his generation.
In his
latest role, as a charming estate lawyer in THE
SKELETON KEY, Sarsgaard once again shows off his ability to subtly steal
a scene. He stopped by the Ritz Carlton in
New Orleans last week to talk about his experience starring alongside Kate
Hudson in the supernatural thriller, opening everywhere on August 12th.
Peter
Sarsgaard
What
attracted you to this project?
I really
wanted to do the movie because the character I’m playing is sort of an
interesting reverse-double somersault with a half-twist pike. I was interested
to see how I would do it. I didn’t
know how I would do it, so I was just sort of like, “Oh, this will be
interesting.”
How
were you prepared to do that? What
were the challenges?
With this
role, I started to think about who this guy’s heroes might be, or who the
heroes would be that I could get away with having.
And I started thinking about Sun Studios, like Carl Perkins and Elvis
Presley and stuff like that, people who sort of took Blues music and made it
popular. I’ve got a little Carl Perkins hairdo in the movie, and I got a drum
kit in my apartment. I started
thinking, “This guy’s like a bassist.”
Keeping the band tight and together and not taking any credit, but he
knows he’s the true rock star in the band.
I thought of him being like a session player from there or something like
that. But obviously he’s an estate
lawyer in
New Orleans
and all that stuff. I think he
thinks of himself as a rock star.
What was it like
working with Kate Hudson and Gena Rowlands?
Kate – I’ve known her for a long time and worked with her
on a movie a long time ago called Desert Blue.
I knew that I liked her and was psyched to act with her.
I knew that we would have a certain amount of chemistry and just thought
it would be great. Gena I’ve
admired since I started acting and I just wanted to be in the shadow of her
somewhere onscreen and I’m just psyched that there’s like one shot in the
movie where both of us are in it. And
John Hurt I’ve always…I remember seeing 1984 when I was a kid, with him and
Richard Burton, and seeing him on the table where he’s being tortured, and
he’s unbelievable. So I’ve
always thought he’s fantastic and I hope to be in
London
this fall and see him in this play he’s gonna do.
You’ve
got another thriller coming up, Flight Plan.
Is it a similar sort of task for you?
That one
is less so, I think. With that one,
it would be very difficult for me to explain it or give it away, because
there’s no single thing in it that is the giveaway.
It’s a movie that constantly changes.
I would have to sit down with you for like half an hour to explain
what’s happening.
Who
do you play in Flight Plan?
I play an
Air Marshall. And Jodie Foster
thinks she got onto the plane with her daughter.
Her husband has just died. She
takes two Klonopin, falls asleep. Wakes
up, her daughter’s gone. She
really believes she had her daughter is one the plane.
And I play the Air Marshall who is trying to determine whether or not
she’s a woman who is going nuts on an airplane because her husband just died,
or if she really did have a daughter on the plane.
So it’s like another little bit of an investigator part.
There’s
a nice buzz surrounding Jarhead. What can
we expect from it?
Jarhead
– people keep asking me if it’s an anti-war movie, and I’m like, name one
good pro-war movie. (laughs)
I want to see that. So our
movie is like…instead of deciding whether or not this war or that war is wrong
or ok, it’s more like, all right, here’s a job that is the hardest job on
the planet. You’ve got to learn to
kill people in a way that is with discipline and is professional and not
personal. And that is the nature of
being a warrior. There’s no other
way to do it. You can argue whether
or not there should ever be a war, but certainly most people would way World War
II was justified. This is a job that
people do. And it has the hardest
training, period. Everybody knows
about boot camp.
The reason
they do that is both to prepare you in your body and your mind.
And then when you get there, you’re ready to do this thing.
That’s why they talk the way they talk, because you don’t want to be
like, “So, I’m going to go over there and pop that guy in the ass, and
I’ll be back in a minute.” You
go, “Yes, sir. I’m going to do the thing.”
It’s a mission. You do it
professionally and you do it exactly and you shoot ‘em through the head.
But what happens when you get over there and you’re not fighting?
And you’re sitting there in the desert and you gotta clean the shitter
and then you gotta clean the humvee and you’ve been there for a couple of
months and you’re missing your girlfriend and stuff and you’ve gone through
this training where you’re ready to kill and you’re not killing and you
might have to kill tomorrow or they might drop chemical…what happens to your
mind?
And so
it’s really a movie that I think honors marines by showing how difficult it is
to be a marine. So I think that
that’s kind of the genius part of the movie.
Usually people when they go to make movies like this, it’s partisan.
To me, that’s not a partisan thing.
That’s like, everybody, if those guys are going over there, you can get
behind the idea that they gotta do it well, and you can understand when they
start fucking up, I think, in this movie, because it is…maybe working on an
oil rig is number two, but this is number one.
What
motivates you to choose the roles that you play?
It depends
on what’s going on with me at the time. I
pick different roles for different reasons, just like any job.
Sometimes I decide to be in a movie because I think the movie is going to
be a socially important movie. Shattered
Glass, I think, was that way for me. Regardless
of what you think of Shattered Glass, I think the message is still relevant.
One of the most fundamental parts of a democracy that we keep forgetting
about is the media, because without information you can’t decide how to vote.
And if you ain’t got the facts, then how do you know whether to vote
for this guy or that guy? Then the
whole thing falls apart. That’s
why I did that movie, because that this story, which on the surface is about
this guy who makes up articles, is really about that idea.
And that’s an idea I feel very strongly about.
And sometimes I just go, in a more whimsical way, “Oh, this might be
fun.” Or sometimes I go, “I want
to work with this person,” or this person’s in it or this person wrote it.
All different reasons.
You
seem to have a pretty good sense of humor. Why
don’t you do more comedies?
I’m
pretty funny in the Dying Gaul I have coming up.
There’s a little comedy in there. It’s
not just me; it’s them.
It’s
them?
Hollywood.
If you do enough movies – I’ve done 25 movies now and a lot of them
have not been comedies – at a certain point it’s just a process of natural
selection. They stop selecting, you
know? Also, I can make a drama
better if it’s not perfectly written. I
know how to do that, to make it better.
A comedy – a lot of comedies revolve around a premise.
He’s in her body, she’s in his body.
If that premise is just fucked from the beginning, there’s no amount of
salvage in saving it. If no one’s
written the jokes, I’m not going to particularly come up with them, you know
what I mean?
How
can you save a drama?
Oh, by
just making it make sense. I go,
“Nobody would do that after that happened. Are you kidding me?
No.” And then we figure out
what might happen. I feel like my
job most of the time is just to go, “Wouldn’t happen.
How would that happen? Ok, if
you want that to happen, then you’ll have to put this in to make that
happen.”
Did
you fix anything on Skeleton Key?
It’s a
process of working together on that type of thing.
We certainly had debates about different things.
A lot of times you lock horns with a director – not in an argumentative
way, but in a way that’s like a Sophoclean dialectic, man.
They got their point of view and you got yours, and the third idea is the
one that’s the good one. And that
happens. It happened on Skeleton
Key, it happens on a lot of movies. But
the guys I admire are…you see Vince Vaughn get into a movie sometimes where on
the page you would be like, “No way is that thing going to make it.”
And I’ve read some of them and been like, “No way.
That can’t possibly work.” And
I really admire and actor like that that can turn a comedy around.
I feel like for me I need to have it happening early.
(laughs)
A big theme of this
movie is the nature of belief. Where
do you stand?
I believe that if you believe, it’s real.
I believe that if you think it does something, then it does something.
If you think you’re having a heart attack and you obsess about it, you
might have a heart attack. Someone
hands you this nut and says you’re going to drop dead in two weeks, if you
believe in it enough you might drop dead in two weeks.
I feel immune from it, because I don’t believe in it.
Are you a cynic?
No, I’m a Catholic. (laughs)