🎧 Star Wars to ‘Train Dreams’: Joel Edgerton Live from TIFF

I talk to the Australian actor about his career and new Netflix indie darling

A QUIET FORCE Joel Edgerton tells me about his new movie, Train Dreams. “This film, to me, is one of those rare films where everything I hoped for has sort of stepped a little higher than I expected.” (Maggie Stephenson/TIFF)

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Joel Edgerton still gets emotional when he thinks about it. Not the story of his new Netflix film Train Dreams (even though there’s a ton of emotion in it). The upcoming drama centers on a taciturn logger (Edgerton) in the Pacific Northwest during the early 20th century as he navigates personal heartbreak and profound cultural change. But Train Dreams, an independent film shot out in the wilderness on a modest budget, has a lot in common with the movies Edgerton, his brother Nash Edgerton and their collaborators made as they started their careers together in Australia. And when he thinks about the passion they felt for their work back then, and how he can still conjure it today — that’s where the emotion comes in.

“I don’t know if I’ve become cynical, but I don’t celebrate things anymore,” Edgerton, 51, told me on stage over the weekend at TIFF. “I feel self-conscious about celebrating. But I remember those days of calling up everyone that would care to even listen and going, ‘I’m doing this!’ The pride of taking each step. I often try to remind myself to be willing to be or let myself be proud of those things.”

DREAMS LIFE Joel and I had a great time talking about his career at TIFF. (Maggie Stephenson/TIFF)

In a long, incredibly in-depth and generous onstage conversation at the Canadian Broadcasting Center as part of the TIFF Industry Conference, Edgerton and I got to talk about the many facets of his career, which started with tiny short films in Australia that led him to film sets working for the likes of Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby) and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and Barry Jenkins (the Prime Video series The Underground Railroad), and now has him working as a director, writer, producer, actor, and ongoing consultant to the films made by old friends like David Michôd (whose Christy bowed in Toronto to strong reviews for Sydney Sweeney).

“The collective brain trust is great,” he says of his Blue Tongue Films crew, who don’t have an office or a business or anything like that but still check in with each other on everything they make. “You could watch an early cut of something or read an early draft of a screenplay and be that voice that's willing to be critical without inflicting any personal wound by doing so. That's been really invaluable.”

For Train Dreams, in which Edgerton starred and served as an executive producer, he teamed up with another duo who don’t go back quite as far as himself and Nash, but may as well be brothers, too. Director Clint Bentley wrote the film’s script alongside Greg Kwedar, his longtime creative partner; they shared an Oscar nomination earlier this year for writing Sing Sing, which Kwedar directed. As Edgerton remembers, when he first met Bentley, the director told him that they had taken inspiration from Blue Tongue. “I was immediately taken with his sensitivity,” Edgerton continues. “He's just a really great person and speaks well to the material that he wants to make.”

On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, you can hear our whole hour-long conversation, which includes a few quick audience questions and some fantastic advice from Edgerton for up-and-coming filmmakers — the advice he’d also give if you came up and asked him while he was surfing, which he says happens more than you think.

Paid subscribers to Prestige Junkie After Party can watch the full video version of this conversation as well, and head to The Ankler’s YouTube page to catch many, many more conversations with the biggest talents of TIFF.