[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Train Dreams.”]
Joel Edgerton wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s not unusual. An actor’s job is to plumb emotions at a moment’s notice. In Clint Bentley’s heart-wrenching drama “Train Dreams,” Edgerton plays a taciturn, stoic Northwestern logger who endures a long, hard, tragic life, from the early teens up to the late ’60s — with some moments of joy with his wife (Felicity Jones) and child, until a raging forest fire incinerates their home.
For most of the film, he barely emotes at all, yet holds our attention. He keeps everything in until a cathartic magic-hour scene with a park ranger (Kerry Condon) at the end of the movie, when he’s finally able to unleash his pent-up feelings. This glorious piece of screen acting could earn the Australian veteran his first Oscar nomination.
Edgerton is up against formidable competition in the Best Actor race: Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Michael B. Jordan lead the field, but a gaggle of candidates are vying for the last two slots, among them Wagner Moura, Jesse Plemons, Jeremy Allen White, George Clooney, and Ethan Hawke. All have supporters. All will garner votes. But who will get enough to squeak into the final five?
Edgerton has a shot. For one thing, Netflix will make sure Academy actors branch members see this adaptation of the 2011 Denis Johnson novella, which boasts a strong pedigree: the writer/director team Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, who delivered the Oscar-nominated “Sing Sing” last year. Netflix is putting up Edgerton in L.A. through the awards season. He’s committed to making the rounds. The movie played well at the Telluride, Middleburg, and Mill Valley film festivals. (And Edgerton won the Acting Award at Mill Valley.) Critics are on board (Metascore: 87), and year-end kudos could boost his Oscar chances.
Finally, Edgerton, 51, is respected and overdue: He has been acting since his start in Australian television in 1993, eventually nabbing awards recognition not only in his home country but stateside, for “The Great Gatsby,” “Animal Kingdom,” “Warrior,” and “Loving.” The Oscar could be next.
Edgerton and I spoke at the Middleburg Film Festival in October.
The actor had already fallen in love with the novella when the project came to him. He had tried to get the rights back in 2018, but saw they were already taken. Bentley later came knocking while he was shooting the first season of “Dark Matter” in Chicago. “How did he know that I’m obsessed by this novella?” Edgerton said. “It felt like it started as a Western, but it became a rumination on life, swirling around the idea of ‘what is the meaning of a life?’ It was a celebration of an ordinary human being, finding the big undulations of a normal life of love and family and the fears around loss and regrowth, of finding a way to move on from terrible things.”
Before Edgerton met with Bentley in Chicago in 2022, the actor cared so much about the material that he was worried about the adaptation. “If you read the novella, it’s not like, just put it in Final Draft, and you’re ready to shoot,” he said. “It’s a complicated structure, and it spans so much time, and it jumps back and forth. It’s not an easy thing to imagine as a movie.”
When Edgerton watched Bentley’s “Jockey” (2021), “three things line up,” he said. “The script is good. He knows how to make a film. I suit this character more than anything I’d read in years: It felt to me like I could be Robert. And then I met Clint. He was so reliable and sensitive and trustworthy.”
Edgerton talked to his wife. He had become a father since reading the book. “The whole thing was terrifying to me,” he said, choking up. “My [twin] kids were born super-premature, and they were in the hospital for a long time. [They are now four-and-a-half.] And I realized my relationship to the whole book and the story had completely evolved into something far more personal, and for that reason, I really [had] to do it. Get through the fear of all that stuff, and maybe this is a chance for me, for the first time in many years, to do something that’s very much me and personal, because I’m a father and I’m a husband and [losing a child] is my greatest fear.
When Robert Grainier loses his wife and child, he falls into deep depression. “In the span of the whole story, the world pushes you around,” said Edgerton. “Good things can happen. But also not so good things happen, and he absorbs that blow in a way that I probably wouldn’t necessarily myself. From the outside, you’d call it stoic, but he has nowhere to place his grief. He pushes everything inside, and every now and then it takes itself out. We don’t realize the value of this quiet man as a presence in the story until we meet Kerry Condon’s character. The thing for me in the film is the need for human connection. And one of the pleasures of being a human being is that we’re able to rely on each other and lean on each other. It’s this chance to finally get this stuff out that is stuck inside of me.”
“Train Dreams” is a portrait of a man from another era, when loggers cut down massive trees with the simplest of tools, without heeding the danger. “He’s an old-fashioned guy,” said Edgerton. “He’s somebody who doesn’t have the mechanics of language and psychology and all the things that we’ve learned how to use to help ourselves. He’s stuck as a man with no verbiage. This inability or reluctance to open yourself up is something [we] observe in a lot of men, and particularly rural men. I even feel it myself. I consider myself very evolved and open-hearted, but I don’t like showing my emotions in front of people.”
The heartbreaking thing about Grainier is that, having pushed through a tough life, he found happiness. Due to the strikes, Bentley and Edgerton spent many hours on the phone over six months talking about the character. “We never see the family he was adopted into,” said Edgerton. “What does family mean to you if you haven’t necessarily had a typical run at being a human coming into the world? Once you find love, and then you create a life, how precious [is that] to you? But what are the cues you have? I remember looking up to my dad like he and my mum knew everything. It’s not until I became a parent that, like, ‘I’m just a kid that can grow a beard.’”
Shooting the logging sections near Spokane was an almost spiritual experience, Edgerton said. Three big trees had been selected to be cut down, and when they were felled, the entire cast and crew assembled to watch. The actual logging wasn’t as hard as it looks.
“I’ve laid bricks for ‘Loving,’ and [did] MMA fighting for ‘Warrior.’ As an actor, you visit that world for a short time, and the task lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes for a take. And once you hear ‘cut,’ you can drop the axe, stop sweating. You develop this incredible admiration for the tenacity of the people that do the thing, whether they’re fighters or loggers, and you realize just how fucking hard it would be.”
Edgerton had no idea so many people lost their lives cutting down trees. Shooting the logging sections in forests around Spokane, “we were assisted by these modern loggers who Clint had been careful in selecting to fell three trees during the production that had been earmarked on private properties that were already marked for felling. You realize the aspects of violence when you cut into a tree, it’s like you’re in a fight with that tree.”
In the first shot of the film, Bentley strapped an Arri Alexa camera to the base of a tree. It’s an astonishing moment. Seeing the trees come down, said Edgerton, “You watch the weight and the glacial quality of something that falls.”
As Edgerton has seen the film at screenings, he believes that “watching the natural environment on screen hits some heart space within audiences. Because we sometimes forget that we’re part of the world. That is a very powerful aspect of this film.”
“Train Dreams” is now in select theaters and will stream on Netflix starting on Friday, November 21.