By Garry Maddox
Even though he is in exotic Budapest – shooting a spookily prescient spy thriller opposite Jennifer Lawrence – Joel Edgerton has been thinking about reality television back in Australia.
"I live my life sometimes unfortunately looking at Australia through a computer," he says. "And there's all this talking and debating and interest in this show Married at First Sight."
Having starred in Loving, a deeply felt drama about an American couple who were arrested, jailed and banished from their home state for an inter-racial marriage in 1958, Edgerton believes that staging weddings for television entertainment is "insulting", especially given the debate about marriage equality.
"We're saying it's interesting and fascinating and TV worthy that we can introduce a man and a woman who have never met and sort of marry them together but we won't allow two men who have had a long, loving, invested, caring, unthreatening, undamaging relationship to marry each other legally," he says. "That's a really weird double standard."
Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving.Credit: Ben Rothstein
Edgerton is speaking from Hungary on an upbeat day. He has just finished writing the first draft of the next film he plans to direct after the success of the creepy thriller The Gift two years ago. His friend Ben Mendelsohn is due in town soon to continue playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in a new Robin Hood. And he is heading to a "halfway mark party" on the shoot for his latest movie, the romantic political thriller Red Sparrow. "It's not enough for people to have starting parties and wrap parties," he says bemused. "Now they've got to have a halfway point party."
Since impressing as Stanley Kowalski opposite Cate Blanchett's Blanche DuBois in Sydney Theatre Company's acclaimed production of A Streetcar Named Desire (2009) and then as a charismatic crim in Animal Kingdom (2010), Edgerton's thriving movie career has included playing a mixed martial arts fighter in Warrior (2011), a squadron team leader in Zero Dark Thirty (2012), brutish Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (2013), pharoah-to-be Ramses in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), a compromised FBI agent in Black Mass (2015) and a state trooper in the sci-fi thriller Midnight Special (2016). He has also returned to Australia for two smaller-scale films – playing a tourist whose Cambodian trip goes bad in Wish You Were Here (2012) and a conflicted detective in Felony (2013), which he also wrote and produced.
Now Edgerton is playing a CIA agent whose lover is a Russian spy (played by Lawrence) in a thriller that seems less fictional by the day given the revelations about the Trump administration's links to the Putin regime. Edgerton has found himself more politically engaged than he has ever been waking up to the news.
"Oh man, it's my new House of Cards – and probably more nail-biting and more surprising than House of Cards," he says. "This movie felt very real world; by pure chance before we even started shooting, it was a Russian-American story. Now it feels like it's strangely linked into a political agenda in its own tiny way."
Joel Edgerton as taciturn bricklayer Richard Loving in Loving.Credit: Ben Rothstein
Loving was among a batch of politically charged films about black American history to feature at the Academy Awards last month – joining best picture winner Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Fences and the documentary O.J.: Made In America.
Edgerton plays a taciturn American bricklayer, Richard Loving, whose inter-racial marriage to Mildred Jeter (Ruth Negga) was illegal in Virginia. After nine years of turmoil, they won a landmark case in the US Supreme Court that overturned the laws banning mixed-race marriages.
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in Loving.Credit: Ben Rothstein
Edgerton was working with director Jeff Nichols on Midnight Special, when he first heard about the film. "Jeff hinted that there was something he would like to do with me next," he says. "And I truly think in that moment he could have told me we were going to shoot a movie about grass growing and I would have signed on for it."
After watching a documentary about the couple, Edgerton fell in love with the Lovings' story of quiet heroism in the face of extreme prejudice.
"I was very moved," he says. "And I could see why Jeff thought I could play this guy. I figured I was roughly the right age with the right stature and the right complexion. But there was going to be a big stretch to create enough of a portrayal of him."
While there are moments of racism in Loving that still feel shocking from a contemporary Australian perspective – the police bursting into the sleeping couple's bedroom to arrest them, for example – Edgerton sees it differently.
"How shocked can you be when you live in 2017 and there's just as bad – or more inter-personal – racism on a similar level that's not backed up by the law obviously," he says. "So it doesn't feel that shocking but I remember thinking it was crazy you couldn't marry based on race 50 years ago.
"But then again, my mind gets cast back home and we're talking about marriage equality. Fifty years later, we're still saying it's OK for you to do one thing, [while] another person can't."
Edgerton and Negga needed to bond as a devoted couple, but they only met six weeks before shooting. "We got to know each other just hanging out in Virginia on a research trip," he says. "The moment I met her I realised she was perfect for who she was playing and there was a quality of transformation and excellence that I hadn't been around much."
So how did they connect closely enough to play the Lovings?
"The big thing was we felt like we were the two lucky, privileged kids in class who'd been given this special pass by the teacher to do a special thing," Edgerton says. "Beyond that, we felt we needed to be very dedicated in order to [leave] the right legacy. That brought us together and we also really liked and loved each other as people."
While Negga was deservedly up for best actress at the Oscars for her quietly dignified performance, Edgerton missed out despite months of speculation that he would get his first nomination, which must have hurt given exactly the same thing happened with Black Mass a year earlier.
"I have to be really honest," Edgerton says. "I learnt something very big through Black Mass. The easiest way to say it in Australia was I had a bit of smoke blown up my arse and I bought into that myth a little bit.
"So this time with Loving I looked back a little bit more objectively and realised it's great to be talked about in that way and if it happens, it happens; and if it doesn't, it doesn't. Your ego does fall prey to that stuff. I feel like that disappointment I felt last year allowed me to put into perspective anything that people say about the things that we make."
The success of The Gift was a psychological boost for Edgerton, who had long been writing with a view to directing a film. "I feel like I got over a big fear, which was the fear of stepping out and being in control of a whole production," he says. "I really put my ego on the line doing that. Now I'm really keen to do it again."
While reluctant to give too much away about the new film, it is "not too far from the world I was living in with The Gift but it's a little bit more socially and politically relevant".
In a busy time, Edgerton, who is now 42, has also acted in his brother Nash's as-yet-untitled thriller with Charlize Theron, Amanda Seyfried and Thandie Newton the horror film It Comes at Night opposite Riley Keough and the sci-fi movie Bright with Will Smith and Noomi Rapace.
"Every year I expect it to plateau or go backwards because I'm a human being and I'm generally wise to be cynical," he says. "But I keep finding these new experiences and I'm lucky enough to work. Life is good, man. Life is great."
Loving is now screening.