Peter Sarsgaard arrived in Karlovy Vary as one of the festival’s few honorees without a new film in the lineup — instead, he presented his 2003 film Shattered Glassa visionary real-life drama about an ethically unmoored journalist whose embellished stories in some ways foresaw the media landscape of today. That doesn’t mean the actor has been idle; he came to the Czech Republic direct from the set of William Gibson’s 1984 sci-fi classic Neuromancer.
“It’s a big, ten-episode thing for Apple,” he reveals. “I play a guy called Ashpool, who, if you’ve read the book, is a guy who’s created something that’s sort of like AI. He’s the wealthiest person in the world, but the world is suffering. He’s in his own small world of not suffering, and you see how that’s an impossibility: Elon Musk may think he’s going to go to Mars to get away from it all, but everything’s going to follow him to Mars. There’s no getting away. And who the f*ck wants to be on Mars?”
More from Deadline
After that, Sarsgaard will be seen in his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new film The Bride!a ’30s-set crime story loosely based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “I’m going to say that it’s going to be controversial,” says the actor. “I mean, it’s very punk. It’s very radical in some ways, and the main characters in it are very imperfect. It’s also a love story, basically. It’s about the monster in all of us.” Contrary to advance rumors, the film is not a musical, as such, although Sarsgaard conceded that there are some dance routines. Is he a good dancer? “I will certainly dance if given the opportunity,” he laughs. “I’m known as the first one on and the last one off the dance floor. I shake it until my moneymaker’s wet.”
DEADLINE: The clip reel of your past work that the festival showed here was pretty impressive…
Peter Sarsgaard: Anguish! [Laughs.] So much anguish, my God.
DEADLINE: How did you feel about it, looking back at your work?
Sarsgaard: I feel like I’m getting better and better as an actor. That’s what I feel like. I feel like at least it’s not going the other way yet.
DEADLINE: Have you always been able to be objective about your acting?
Sarsgaard: I think when I was younger, I thought I was great, period. Yeah. When I first started acting, the first time I ever did it, this beautiful woman named Karen Schmulen asked me to come to an acting class with her, because I seemed depressed or something. And so, I audited an acting class, and I remember sitting there watching these other actors. I always felt really like a non-actor. And I felt like a non-actor for a long time, because a lot of the people who were actors that I grew up around were very theatrical people. And the class had a lot of those people. They asked me to read from this play, Bentwhich is about homosexuals in the Holocaust, and it was an insanely dramatic scene where he has to prove his sexuality — prove that he’s heterosexual — by having sex with a dead woman. And I mean, the stakes could not be higher!
And I didn’t know that I could do it. I thought, well, this is impossible. And then I started doing it, and it was like I slipped into [a trance] and I came out the other side and everyone was looking at me like they had just watched something, and I went, ‘Oh wow, I’m really good at this. And so, I felt like I was really good at it kind of immediately. And I look back now and I see someone who needed to be seen, had a lot of emotions to let go of and express, and I was sort of just venting emotions for a long time. It wasn’t as finely nuanced as I’m ultimately capable of. And it took a number of years to get all of that out. Now, I have access to an emotional life, but that doesn’t have to be everything.
DEADLINE: When did you reach that point of letting go?
Sarsgaard: I mean, it was gradual. I don’t know that there was an exact moment, but I knew it was something that I needed to ultimately do. I was asked to play a lot of people in crisis situations early on, a lot of victims. My audition for Dead Man Walking was: “Your girlfriend is getting raped in front of you. Improvise.” I actually have the audition tape. The casting director, Doug Aibel, still had it, and I saw it recently. It’s very convincing. I look like a person who’s watching his girlfriend get raped, but that’s only one aspect of acting, right? To put yourself in heightened imaginary circumstances and be able to do it. I’m really glad that I’m not having to do that anymore. I mean, to be fair, the circumstances in Neuromancer that I’m doing right now are insanely high, the given circumstances, and I’m approaching it differently. The thing to remember is that people disassociate really well. This is something I think actors forget. I mean, if your girlfriend’s being raped in front of you, I don’t know that you even weep. I think you might. I don’t know. Look at people in wartime. They’re not crying and pulling their hair out all the time. They’re in a kind of survival mode. It’s not anguish all the time. So, I think that that’s something that it takes time and wisdom to realize.
DEADLINE: Were you disappointed that your last film, September 5didn’t get the attention it deserved?
Sarsgaard: I think it was controversial, considering what’s going on in Israel. What was interesting about that film is I had people who were on both sides of that war come up to me and say, “I have problems with the film,” and I’ve had people who are on both sides of that situation come up to me and say that they thought the film was great. To me, that film was just about journalism. It was about the beginning of 24/7 news coverage, and it asks, “Is seeing something in real time, without having any perspective on it, the truth?” I mean, is it better to take 24 hours to fully understand something versus following it second by second? Where you point the camera, you’ve made a decision already. It’s already subjective. This idea that a live camera is the truth I don’t think is… It’s certainly not the full truth.
So… I don’t know. To me, it exceeded its expectations. When I went to go make that movie, if somebody had told me that it would’ve been nominated for any awards, I would’ve been very surprised.
DEADLINE: Just because it was so small?
Sarsgaard: Yeah. It was made for nothing. It had no money behind it. Awards are about money. Look, if you’re on a big movie, that’s a lot of voters that are just on your movie set that are going to vote for your movie, right? Or if your director has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards, chances are he will be nominated, the film will be nominated, and all the actors will be nominated. The awards are no litmus test of anything other than a certain degree of quality and popularity.
I think awards are important for shining a light on movies that otherwise wouldn’t have been seen. And so that’s why, I guess in some sense, I’m into a kind of affirmative action with awards. We should really go, “What needs it?” Not necessarily what deserves it, because who the f*ck knows what deserves it? We all have different opinions on that, but what could use a spotlight? What could use some attention? For me, a film like Nickel Boysthat deserves some attention. That’s an interesting thing that happened not that long ago in the United States and I thought the film was very well-made and, yeah, give that film some attention.
DEADLINE: You’re in Karlovy Vary with another film about journalism, Shattered Glassabout a guy who fabricates his stories…
Sarsgaard:…In the interest of entertainment?
DEADLINE: Yes. How do you think that story resonates in today’s world?
Sarsgaard: Isn’t journalism all about entertainment on some level? I mean, why do we cover a hurricane coming toward some place in 24/7 coverage? It’s not just to warn people to get away. It’s because it’s entertaining. It’s a natural phenomenon that looks incredible. “Oh, we’re going to get in a plane and we’re going to look at it from the top and it’s impressive.” It’s viewership. A lot of the places where I get my news are not supported by advertising. And I think that if viewership is your model and advertising and all of that, then it’s going to have an effect on the news. So, what happens in Shattered Glass is, he’s trying to make it entertaining. So, he fabricates things to make it more entertaining. I think that happens so much now that it’s almost like the movie feels old-fashioned. Right? I know a couple of journalists who are independent journalists, and I actually get a lot of my news from them.
DEADLINE: In your speech the other night you touched on current affairs in the United States. Do you like to use your platform as an actor, as a public figure, or is it more about the need to express how you feel?
Sarsgaard: I have no idea if anyone will listen to what I say, but anytime I’m in front of a microphone and there are a bunch of people, I consider it an opportunity. And I certainly am not going to stand up there and weep about how my acting teacher helped me get to this moment. I think we are not in the age of individual achievement. Nobody wants to watch an actor get up there and be like, “This is my big moment!”
I think, above a certain level of quality in acting, we’re all basically doing the same thing. Some people have more opportunities; some people have fewer opportunities. Some people have a bigger range, some of them less. And so, with the speech I gave in Venice and the one I gave here, I wrote them both on the same day that I gave them. It’s whatever is on my mind on that day. I told [my agent] I was going to give a 45-second speech, because I also don’t believe in long speeches. And in 45 seconds I want to say what? This is an opportunity to say something. I’m not an overtly political person. I’m not going to take down one political leader and prop up another. I’m not going to weigh in on some issue that’s incredibly divisive, even though I have my own opinions about it. But I try to do a more 30,000ft view of what I think is all of our problems. What I don’t see a lot in the world is anyone asking, “what is our collective problem?” I think for 99% of us, 1% [of the population] is fucking things up.
DEADLINE: Do you think actors in particular are starting to self-censor, because they don’t know whether their words will be used against them?
Sarsgaard: I think that that time is ending. I was looking at actors at Cannes, they were all speaking out quite forcefully about things they believed in. I mean, some of them pretty controversially. I don’t feel scared about it, really. I mean, I’m not an actor that’s in big blockbusters that have to sell to every single person. My audience doesn’t have to be absolutely everyone. When you make a movie for $10 million or under, you can make it however you want it. You don’t have to have everybody like it. If you make a movie for a $100 million then you have to not say anything controversial. The good news is that I’m not like Tom Cruise. I think for him there would probably be more at stake in terms of saying what he thought. In some ways he does say what he thinks, but not super-controversially.
DEADLINE: What is your relationship with technology and AI?
Sarsgaard: My relationship with that stuff? Well, I’m just old enough that… I mean, I have memories of black and white television and getting up and changing the channel. I watched [TV shows] Hogan’s Heroes, Baa Baa Black Sheep. These were the things I grew up watching. And we didn’t get cable for a long time, because my family doesn’t watch television. We didn’t get cable until I was, I think, 14. And then I didn’t get a cell phone until I was 23 or something like that. But my dad was a computer programmer and salesman and stuff and knew a lot about computers. And so, we always had IBM computers in the house. My dad also had a ham radio. They felt similar. So, my relationship with technology is still like that. I use this phone for music and chess. That’s about it.
Best of Deadline
Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitterand Instagram.
