Australian actor Joel Edgerton at the Wish You Were Here premiere in Sydney on Monday. Picture: Getty Images. Source: Getty Images
Michael Bodey, The Australian, reports
Joel Edgerton hoped his occupation might be his passport. After travelling to Texas with a play as a schoolboy, the young actor decided he wouldn't bother travelling on a gap year.
"I thought I can be an actor and travel the world," the 37-year-old recalls. "It took me a while but then I started heading off to these weird and wonderful places."
This week, he was in his home town of Sydney with co-star Teresa Palmer at the premiere of the Australian film partly shot in Cambodia, Wish You Were Here.
Next week, he departs for places unknown, or at least not public, to begin filming Kathryn Bigelow's follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, a film dramatising the US Navy SEALs attack and assassination of Osama bin Laden.
"I've been involved in movies that had confidentiality agreements and, looking back at them, they all look rather cosmetic compared to this," he says with a laugh.
After a swag of films that have taken him to the US, Britain, Canada and India, Edgerton enjoyed bunkering down in Sydney filming The Great Gatsby recently for Baz Luhrmann.
"He dreams big in a country where we're a little bit shy to dream big because we know it will attract criticism," Edgerton says of Luhrmann.
As he travels the globe adding to his growing resume of Hollywood and European films, Edgerton has maintained a steady mix of Australian films.
Conversely, Palmer says she jumped at the chance to take on Kieran Darcy-Smith and Felicity Price's thriller about the fallout from a Cambodian holiday gone wrong because she wanted to experience the feel of an Australian film again. The 26-year-old actress has already starred in major studio pictures including Bedtime Stories and I Am Number Four and hadn't worked here since she filmed December Boys in 2006.
"I've carved my path in America doing these big movies and I was switching it up by moving between genres," Palmer says. "But I was missing that sense of collaboration you get on these smaller, local movies."
And for once, her US agents were enthusiastic about her heading home.
"Sometimes they want you to stick around in America and earn lots of money on the studio films," Palmer says.
The prospect of Darcy-Smith's direction appealed to them because he is part of the Blue Tongue Films collective that includes the Edgerton brothers, Joel and Nash, Animal Kingdom's David Michod and Oscar nominee Luke Doolan.
"Blue Tongue has a huge reputation in the US, especially since Animal Kingdom," Palmer says. "I've been taking meetings over there and people are asking about the Blue Tongue collective. They really like their grittier, more real films. I feel like a new wave of directors and Aussie actors is being recognised over there right now."
Wish You Were Here is very much part of that collective's success after being chosen to open the international section of the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in January. Subsequently, Darcy-Smith has signed with a big US agency, WME, and the film has secured distribution in North America. They couldn't wish to be anywhere else.
Wish You Were Here opens on Anzac Day.
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