Peter Sarsgaard talks Bond with Jessica Chastain after the film wraps – The Hollywood Reporter

Peter Sarsgaard’s role in memory It leans heavy, at least on paper. The actor plays Saul, a man struggling to cope with early-onset dementia. He meets a former classmate, played by Jessica Chastain, who is struggling herself — she was raped by older boys as a child, and is 13 years sober when the film begins. But Sarsgaard, who was recently seen Batman And narcotic disease (Plus wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, Missing daughter) He says he didn’t feel any weight. “I felt like I had to get this role, and once I got it, I was excited to do it,” he says. THR. “This movie is not violent, it doesn’t stop at brutality, and yet it’s very entertaining – it’s fun.”

He admits that this weightlessness is somewhat unusual. “When I played Robert Kennedy (in… Jackie), this was a role where you get into it and think, “I just had sex,” the actor says. “I remember the director Pablo Larraín said: ‘Don’t worry about it, no one cares that you’re Kennedy.’ But even if you did a great job, people would say: ‘Well, he was a good Kennedy imitator.’ But that – there was no sign that could Hit her.

As Saul, the man the audience meets during an unsettling scene (he follows Sylvia Chastain home from a high school reunion), Sarsgaard says he went off script a bit, choosing to play the character as someone who refuses to be like him. “I had him be someone who said, ‘I’ve got a few more minutes, so do you want to have a little party?’” he explains.

The strategy proved successful: Sarsgaard, long a beloved actor, received the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival and spoke to… THR As part of an awards campaign, which came as a (pleasant) surprise to him. He refers affectionately to memory As a “smallest film”. The indie game has hit the festival circuit in search of distribution and will now reach audiences through Ketchup Entertainment, which is not affiliated with AMPTP. “I’m stepping up in a way I’ve never done before, because this movie deserves it, and it couldn’t have been seen without promotion,” Sarsgaard says. “For me, awards are for films like this.”

Sarsgaard’s resume is a respectable mix of these smarter projects and big-budget films like Jarhead or Batman. He still has a deep appreciation for good action sequences, but he also viscerally remembers the phase of his career that required a bit of “sucking it up,” so to speak. At home, he and Gyllenhaal jokingly refer to the process as Get the Ibex. “In the past, for a woman who had an acting career like[Maggie]the industry looked at her decision to take a role in something that wasn’t great differently than they looked at me, as a man,” he explains. “So I’ll go away and make a movie and come back with a movie The big ibexWhich gave her the opportunity to stay true to what she believes in. She felt very honored to do this for us.

He’s been participating in promotional tours alongside Chastain, which has also provided an opportunity to get to know her — something that didn’t happen on set. In the film, Sylvia is often hostile toward Saul, and Chastain is “the person who really becomes her character,” Sarsgaard says. They didn’t interact much outside of rehearsals and filming, and he laughingly describes their closing day as “the craziest way I’ve ever done it with someone.” The two were filming a scene on a New York subway platform, standing about 15 feet apart, and then waved to each other from a distance when the cameras stopped rolling: “It was very honest between us, that way.” And now that they’ve had the opportunity to celebrate the film on the track — especially during the SAG-AFTRA strike, when they were unable to promote their work because of concessions — he says it’s nothing like her character. “She stood up for me in a way no one had ever done before, and I owe her an enormous amount,” he says.

memory It will be released theatrically in December, and shortly thereafter, Sarsgaard will be invited to promote the David E. Kelley film. Innocent, the miniseries that he filmed with his brother-in-law Jake Gyllenhaal just before production went on hiatus. The project comes nearly two decades after they first worked together Jarhead, and it provided the opportunity for the two to be more equal on screen than that initial experience. “At the time I had been dating his sister for a few years and was really shooting the movie to spend time with my future brother-in-law; I was very angry with that group because it was like a long-term commitment to not do a lot of things,” he says. “Cleaning the gun, which my ego didn’t enjoy.”

He will then report to the set of his wife’s next project (rumoured to be a Netflix remake Bride of Frankenstein, although he plays coy on the details.) He’s getting a lot of attention, and Sarsgaard is keen to point out that these risks are not normal for him. “I’ve made a lot of films that didn’t get any attention,” he says, “and those are the films that if someone came up to me on the sidewalk and mentioned them, I would sit there and chat with them for half an hour.” Sarsgaard. “When a film has a young audience, I feel very happy to meet that audience.”

This story first appeared in the November 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.