Story by Giles Hardie, The Age
Ten years ago Joel Edgerton thought his career was about to explode. Now, success has finally arrived, partly against doctor's orders.
“You take a few punches in the head, but that was kind of fun.”
Joel Edgerton is talking about his time shooting the numerous fight scenes for Warrior, in which he plays an out-of-retirement Mixed Martial Arts cage fighter whose never say die attitude leads to many, many poundings in every one of his fights. He could just as easily have been describing his career.
Edgerton had already shot Warrior when he last toured Australia for a press tour, a little over a year ago, for Waiting City a critically acclaimed, but relatively low profile Australian film. At the time, he knew everything was about to explode for him career-wise, he just couldn’t tell anyone.
“Work was starting to roll along,” he recalls, “I’m pretty guarded about it all.”
Edgerton was hesitant to celebrate, having had false starts before.
“I’ve had times in my life where I’d worked on a few things and I thought it was going to push things to a different level and it just didn’t.”
Almost a decade ago, Edgerton was shooting at Fox Studios with George Lucas on the second (and later the third) Star Wars prequel, in the role of Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen. A role in King Arthur followed, yet the momentum never quite swept him up. Now, with two Hollywood films releasing this month alone (he can also be seen in The Thing), and Edgerton back at Fox Studios to shooting on The Great Gatsby in the major role of Tom Buchanan, that momentum has well and truly kicked in.
Still Joel is modest about his new star status. “At the moment, I feel like things have shifted only because I get asked to jobs a lot more than I used to. I get asked to do jobs without having to audition for them.”
“Things have definitely changed. I feel like the doors have opened wider and I can choose between things.”
That false start ten years ago, those punches to the head, have actually prepared Edgerton for the new, spectacular success.
“I felt like it would feel different,” he admits. “It doesn’t feel any different, but I do. When I look at the circumstances surrounding it, I’m very thankful of it, and I realise that I’m swimming around exactly where I wanted to be ten years ago and I’ve got those opportunities now.”
There has been at least one advantage to not being a “movie star” until now, and that is his role in Warrior, for which he’s receiving significant awards buzz. Basically, if Joel had been a star, he might not have wanted it, and director Gavin O’Connor certainly wouldn’t have wanted him.
Warrior, at that point an unkown script about cage fighting “wasn’t high on the list to do for other actors,” Joel explains. That suited O’Connor, according to Joel “he wanted two actors who didn’t have a lot of movie star baggage.”
The other actor without baggage is Tom Hardy, another whose career has skyrocketed since shooting Warrior.
Not only did O’Connor need two actors without baggage though, he needed two with a fairly clear calendar. Edgerton says of the casting rationale, “he wanted two guys, and he founded Tom and I, and he needed us to get there a couple of months early, and train hard, and start to kind of look like we belonged in the cage.”
Edgerton, playing the former MMA figher Brendan Conlon, certainly looks like he belongs - as the poster and trailer attest - yet Hardy as his brother Tommy looks like a veritable man mountain.
Edgerton got along very well with Hardy, but envied his bulk.
“I was about as big as I could get with the amount of food I was shoving in to me, and the weight I was losing,” he recalls. “I wasn’t going to get any bigger.”
“And he (Hardy) just looks huge.”
Edgerton also envied Hardy’s shooting schedule as the big hitting Tommy, whose fights tend to be over in a matter of seconds.
“Tom, he’d walk in and do a fight and it would take a day to shoot,” Joel explains. “I would take a week, two weeks to shoot just one fight.”
“I literally am a punching bag to some of the best fighters in the AMC.”
Some of those punches landed, and even if he thought it was fun, Edgerton’s character’s pain endurance wasn’t all acting.
“I was actually advised by a doctor here in Sydney that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to do the movie.
“But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I’m not smart enough to take advice like that.”
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