Unlike many actors, Peter Sarsgaard got some work during lockdown: an 11-minute short, shot by his wife, Maggie Gyllenhaal, on their rural estate in Vermont. Penelope, now on Netflix, is the strange, moving story of a widowed farmer, facing a sad future, broken only by a delirious evening humping a tree.
“I’m never going to look at that tree in the same way again, and I don’t think that tree will ever look at me in the same way again,” says Sarsgaard. He’s on lockdown again with his family, this time in Greece, where they are shooting Gyllenhaal’s directing debut proper, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. “That was the first thing Maggie told me about Penelope. She said: ‘I want you making love to a tree.’ And I was like” – a resigned sigh – “Oh, whatever. I’ll do it!”
A dendrophiliac farmer is one of Sarsgaard’s less unusual roles. It is 25 years since he made his movie debut, as Sean Penn’s murder victim in Dead Man Walking. (Penn, “an inclusive, gentle guy”, took him out for dinner to apologise.) Since then, his signature role has been something sinister, or at least unsettling, making use of his purring voice and ever-narrowing eyes. He was an amiable sociopath in Boys Don’t Cry, the mad patricidal scientist in Green Lantern. When he first on Zoom he suddenly looms, darkly lit with a ginormous fuzzy beard, sitting against the rails of a cheap-looking bedhead; a creepy Rip Van Winkle stuck in a low-budget Airbnb. But any whiff of evil is soon dispelled by a big, affable smile. Are people often scared off by his CV?
“People like it! People like the bad guy. Because these are all thoughts and feelings that people have inside of them. Look at what gets the ratings just in terms of the news: people are interested in murder, they’re interested in disaster. This is some part of human nature, and it might be a distasteful one, but it doesn’t really help to ignore it.” That said, he does insist: “I do have a limit. I have turned things down that I thought were awful without any … you know.”
Sarsgaard’s character in his latest movie, Veena Sud’s twisty, scary The Lie, is somewhere along the way on the Awful Spectrum. Without giving anything away, he plays Jay, an errant father who has difficult relationships with his ex-wife (Mireille Enos) and his teenage daughter Kayla (Joey King); when Kayla does something awful, the trio’s routine dysfunctionality becomes something properly horrific. Reflecting on Jay, Sarsgaard is mostly appalled at how irresponsible and ill-informed he is as a dad.
“I’m a different kind of parent,” he says, “of the suffocating variety.” He knows his children (Ramona, 14, and eight-year-old Gloria) much better than that, he tuts. Parenting is, he says, “really what I’ve always wanted to do – more than acting or any of the other things I do in my life. I enjoy it. I teach my kids music every day” – oboe for Ramona, violin for Gloria. They’re a close family: the last time he shaved a beard off, Ramona kept the trimmings in a pouch for two years before “she realised it was disgusting”. He’s cut back on micromanaging, he says. “I mean, I just read Anna Karenina, and I have two children around me! So I’d say that’s a good sign.”
Parts of Sarsgaard, 49, could suggest a certain luvvie self-sufficiency: the arty short films, the beard, the reading Tolstoy in Vermont soundtracked by his daughter’s oboe. He and Gyllenhaal, who married in 2009, also own a brownstone in Brooklyn, showcased in Architectural Digest last year. And yet he also seems bright, generous and self-aware. The son of an air force engineer from Illinois, he moved home more than 10 times before college. He did a play just once at school, aged 10, believing instead that he would play soccer until a succession of concussions literally knocked that on the head.
“I wasn’t part of the culture of acting,” he shrugs. “I wasn’t a group person – I’m an only child. So I wasn’t at first interested in the community of theatre.” Did that swiftly change? “Over time,” he settles. “I’ll say this: if there’s some value in me being in the group, I will.” Otherwise? “If the script says that I play a loner guy that comes to town, then I will happily be that guy.”
Which may or may not bring us to Sarsgaard’s bat house: a garden sanctuary for as many as 200 bats, much needed in New England, where they are now threatened. “We need bats,” cries Sarsgaard. “We need bats!” Another tragedy of the pandemic is the tainting of their reputation, he thinks. “There are things you shouldn’t do to animals,” he chides, “like maybe eat them raw, or sell them, hang out with them in close proximity. But without bats, the world is gonna really suck.”
