Oh my word, it’s Peter Sarsgaard! Ohhhh! He’s sitting all of a metre away! Mmmmm! He’s alone in a room with me for the next 30 minutes! Phwoarrr!! And the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal is nowhere in sight! Steady, old woman. Think of your nerves, and what remains of your dignity. That’s what I’d be saying if I weren’t such a consummate professional.
As it happens, I’m not at all flustered or losing the ability to move most of my bulk from the scalp down. I barely notice that he’s one of those few movie stars who look just as comely in person as they do on screen. Or that he’s even more impressively smart than his canny CV suggests.
“Hey,” he says, taking my hand.
“Ohhhh,” is what I did not squeak by way of reply, keeping in mind that I, and only I, have access to the transcript tapes of this interview. Ha.
No wonder some strange woman (who isn’t me) has already snapped up all of his screen personas through a new online service that, bizarrely, allows you to marry your favourite fictional character.
“Huh? I haven’t come across this one,” he starts, looking decidedly alarmed. “Jesus, that’s just scary. Are my characters all happy with our new bride?”
I haven’t heard anything to indicate otherwise, but it’s seriously difficult to picture Mr. Sarsgaard’s characters all living peaceably together. As Clyde Martin in last year’s Kinsey, he seduced both the good doctor (Liam Neeson) and his missus (Laura Linney). In high-gloss Hollywood thrillers Flightplan and The Skeleton Key, he played duplicitous nefarious super-villains. He was twisted in Boys Don’t Cry and The Salton Sea, upstanding in Shattered Glass, dissatisfied in Garden State and naked (mmmm, phwoarrr etc.) in every other thing he’s committed to celluloid.
“Thing is, I actually like cavorting around naked on screen,” he admits. “Like most men I secretly think of myself as Cassanova, a really suave and seductive machine with the ladies, so it’s no stretch being an exhibitionist.”
Currently, you can catch Mr. Sarsgaard in uniform as a surly marine in Sam Mendes’ Gulf War I movie, Jarhead. It’s a role that mostly pitches the 34 year-old against Jake (Donnie Darko) Gyllenhaal, his brother-in-law in all but the details.
“Jake would pick on me because I kept cutting lines,” recalls Peter. “But I didn’t think we had time to go into detail on personal history and I’m not a talkative person anyway. But it was an interesting bonding process. I’ve known him for the three years I’ve been with Maggie and I already had a sort of big brother relationship with him. Like I’m the one with the wisdom. Being in the Mexican desert with matching haircuts shooting this film evened things up between us.”
Given Jarhead’s rather pertinent historical setting no one should have a heart-attack to learn that the film has generated considerable controversy in the US, drawing fire from all sides like no film since Team America; World Police. Some commentators were dismayed by Mendes’ depiction of a ridiculous phoney war where soldiers are redundant save for answering dopey questions from embedded reporters. Others feel it glorifies the military as a frat party.
“Liberals felt that the film didn’t speak sufficiently to their cause,” explains Peter. “They complained that it was a recruiting film, that it made it look like fun. People are more conservative wanted to know why we were taking the marines down. I think Sam was always treading a fine line. He wasn’t out to bring down the marines or recruit for them. He just wanted to portray them honestly. There are some bad ones in the movie, like the guy who hacks up the dead body, and there are lots of decent guys. He was mostly interested in the fact that these guys are trained to kill. They turn off some part of their brain. Then they get over to the desert and they wait. What is it to sit on that feeling? What’s interesting is that in Europe people are reading the film as an expression of America’s secret love of war. It’s not just the marines. American culture is obsessed with war and violence. We carry more guns than any other society. We fight constantly whether we call in a conflict in Panama or a war in Iraq.”
Unlike his performances in Kinsey or The Centre Of The World, Jarhead requires that Mr. Sarsgaard remains in uniform throughout, but you can’t keep a good wannabe Casanova down
“I did in fact manage to get naked in this film,” says Peter. “It’s hidden away in one of the dreamier sequences. You wouldn’t notice it unless you looked really hard in the right place, but I had to get it in there.”
Rest assured I’ll be combing the DVD to check it out. Just to confirm the veracity of the story you understand.