![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/9a3d4d19ebe63c25520607b6923cc7a4f3-traindreams-joel.rhorizontal.w700.jpg)
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\n For years, he was the opposite of what we expect from leading men. But the Train Dreams actor has become a more memorable onscreen presence with age.
\n Photo: Netflix\n <\/p>\n
Joel Edgerton is getting the best reviews of his career for Train Dreams, and with good reason. Clint Bentley\u2019s powerful, melancholy drama \u2014 for my money the best film of the year<\/a> \u2014 tells the life story of one man and remains intently focused on its mostly passive central character throughout. So much of the picture plays out on Edgerton\u2019s face that by the end, this actor, who has been working pretty much nonstop for the past quarter of a century, feels inseparable from this character. It\u2019s like somehow the rest of his career has ceased to exist.<\/p>\n Which is a stunning development, really, because this man has been in huge films. The Australian actor got his big break playing Owen Lars, the nascent Uncle Owen of the Star Wars series, in Attack of the Clones; he showed up in King Arthur (not that one<\/a>, the other one<\/a>) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (for which he wound up in the middle of a casting controversy<\/a>) and The Great Gatsby and Smokin\u2019 Aces; I could have sworn he was in Black Hawk Down but no, turns out he was in Zero Dark Thirty. Indeed, for years, it was hard to pin down Edgerton as a performer. Was he a leading man, a character actor, a turbo-loaded supporting player? He wasn\u2019t quite a movie star (and showed little interest in being one), but like most movie stars he rarely strayed from a highly specific range. He was the quiet, stony guy, sturdy when good and immovable when villainous. Some of his best parts came in roles that played his restraint off more flamboyant co-stars: He makes a solid foil for Chiwetel Ejiofor\u2019s drag queen in Julian Jarrold\u2019s Kinky Boots, and in Gavin O\u2019Connor\u2019s once super-underrated (but now rightly beloved) Warrior, he\u2019s thoroughly compelling as the struggling, subdued high-school teacher who winds up in the same MMA tournament as his unhinged war-vet brother (played by Tom Hardy).<\/p>\n For years, Edgerton\u2019s anti-charisma has been the opposite of what we expect from leading men. We shouldn\u2019t be able to take our eyes off them, but he plays characters who might be easy to miss. In his early career, that often resulted in roles that made little impression, but over the years it has become one of his unique strengths. For all his clearly enormous talent, Edgerton has only in the past decade or so gained the gravitas that allows him to truly embrace these haunted characters \u2014 not just to play them but to become them. Before Train Dreams, his most impressive achievement might have been writing, directing, and co-starring in The Gift<\/a> (2015), a psychological thriller that manages to be a real psychological thriller and not just an action movie or a horror flick masquerading as one. There, he plays \u201cGordo the Weirdo,\u201d a mostly forgotten and oddball high-school friend who may or may not be exacting unspeakable psychic revenge on a wonderfully smug Jason Bateman. The film puts Edgerton\u2019s general anonymity and unreadability to great use: We spend pretty much the entire picture wondering what\u2019s going through his mind. The Gift suggests that Joel Edgerton the director understands how best to use Joel Edgerton the actor.<\/p>\n He followed that up the following year with Jeff Nichols\u2019s Loving, in which he brings a submerged constancy to the real-life role of rural working-class Virginian Richard Loving, whose marriage to a Black woman (Ruth Negga, in one of her best performances) led to a landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling. Edgerton\u2019s character is a humble, silent sort \u2014 so much so that the racists around him think that he\u2019s just too dumb to understand that interracial marriage is illegal. The film is a historical drama but its austerity gives it an admirable, present-tense kick. Nichols stays fixed on the very modest, ordinary couple at the story\u2019s heart, and Edgerton\u2019s matter-of-fact reserve \u2014 he\u2019s marrying this woman because he loves her, yet he also feels quiet shame that he has to put her through this ordeal \u2014 is both authentic and moving.<\/p>\n Edgerton never seems to stop working, and he has also continued to write and direct (he co-wrote the Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet historical epic The King and wrote and directed the 2019 drama Boy Erased), so one suspects that he\u2019d like to spend more time behind the camera. Train Dreams is a case of the stars fully aligning on a project. Edgerton (who has an executive-producer credit on the film) has said that he read Denis Johnson\u2019s novella around the time of its 2011 publication and even inquired into the rights back then. But it wasn\u2019t until many years later that he connected with director Bentley, by which point he had also become a father and entered what now appears to be a new stage of his career. The character of Robert Grainier ages from childhood to his 80s over the course of the picture, so the age of the actor ultimately shouldn\u2019t matter that much \u2014 and yet it\u2019s hard to imagine Edgerton doing this part in his 30s.<\/p>\n As he\u2019s gotten older, however, he has become a more memorable onscreen presence, his middle-age face now a mesmerizing landscape of regret. In Paul Schrader\u2019s brilliant 2022 thriller Master Gardener, Edgerton plays a recovering white-supremacist assassin who turned government witness and is now trying to live a life of quiet anonymity; as his past starts to reemerge and he finds himself pushed to extremes, we see him struggle with his inner violence. Here is another passive character \u2014 the kind of thing they tell you to avoid in Filmmaking 101 classes and probably Acting 101 classes too \u2014 and yet he captivates with the subtlest acting touches.<\/p>\n One of the things modern actors struggle with the most is conveying genuine thought onscreen. Especially if the dialogue isn\u2019t there to express these inner conflicts, performers flail: They either do too much and wind up looking freakish, or they do too little and start to seem stilted or somnolent. Because the trick is to never let us fully know what the person is thinking; that would undo the mystery of the character. Our understanding should only go about halfway. That hasn\u2019t lent itself well to blockbusters, which usually demand that things be spelled out in big, bold cinematic fashion (that\u2019s just one reason why Edgerton\u2019s turn as Ramses in Exodus<\/a> was so frustrating), but it\u2019s the engine that holds most great dramas together. As well as some not-so-great dramas: The same year as Master Gardener, Edgerton played an undercover cop in the Australian thriller The Stranger, in which he posed as a hardened criminal trying to gain the confidence of a drifter played by Sean Harris so as to get him to confess to a horrific crime committed years ago. Buried behind a burly beard, Edgerton is borderline opaque; he\u2019s often backlit or presented in harsh profiles that rarely let us see his full face. And the less we can tell, the more we want to know. The movie doesn\u2019t always work, but when it does, it\u2019s mostly because of Edgerton. The actor now does this over and over again, in film after film, and somehow makes it all look effortless.<\/p>\n I first saw Train Dreams at Sundance earlier this year. It wowed me then, but I keep returning to it and being even more impressed and moved by it. And I can\u2019t shake the image of Edgerton\u2019s sad visage, which we often experience in close-up. His character is a logger who doesn\u2019t know (or much care) who his real parents were; he\u2019s not an educated man or a particularly industrious or ambitious one. In other words, he is not a person about whom stories are usually written. The magic of Train Dreams \u2014 with its gather-round-the-fire-style narration and almost epic sweep \u2014 is the way it lends mythic grandeur to the story of a largely unremarkable man. This is also why it\u2019s so powerful: because this confused, quietly-suffering individual is a lot closer to us than all the brazen activists and suffering artists and blazing racers and throbbing lovers and supernatural beings that populate most movies. And it requires an actor of uncommon artistry and magnetism to make it all work. If once upon a time Joel Edgerton was merely a familiar face, he has now become something altogether different: an unforgettable presence.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, he was the opposite of what we expect from leading men. 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