Peter Sarsgaard’s role in Memory leans heavy, at least on paper. The actor plays Saul, a man struggling to come to terms with his early onset dementia. He meets a former classmate, played by Jessica Chastain, who is struggling herself — she was raped by older boys as a child and is 13 years into sobriety when the movie begins. But Sarsgaard, who was most recently seen in The Batman and Dopesick (as well as wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter), says he felt no weight. “I felt that I had to get this part, and once I had it, I was excited to do it,” he tells THR. “This movie is not violent, it doesn’t hinge on brutality, and yet it’s highly entertaining — that is a pleasure.”
This weightlessness, he admits, is rather unusual. “When I played Robert Kennedy [in Jackie], that was a role where you get it and think, ‘I’m just fucked,’ ” says the actor. “I remember the director Pablo Larraín saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, nobody cares that you’re Kennedy.’ But even if I did a great job, people would just say, ‘Well, he imitated Kennedy well.’ But this — there was no mark to hit.”
Sarsgaard and Jessica Chastain in ‘Memory,’ written and directed by Michel Franco.
Courtesy of Yves Cape/Venice
As Saul, a man whom audiences meet during an unsettling scene (he follows Chastain’s Sylvia home from their high school reunion), Sarsgaard says he went off-script a little, choosing to play the character as someone who refuses to be his condition. “I made him someone who was like, ‘I’ve got a few more minutes left in me, so want to have a little party?’ ” he explains.
The strategy has proved successful: Long a beloved character actor, Sarsgaard received the Venice Film Festival’s Volpi Cup for best actor and spoke to THR as part of an awards campaign that has come as a bit of a (pleasant) surprise to him. He refers, affectionately, to Memory as “the tiniest movie.” The indie entered the festival circuit in search of distribution and will now reach audiences through the decidedly non-AMPTP company Ketchup Entertainment. “I’m hustling in a way I never have before, because this movie deserves it, and it wouldn’t be seen without the promotion,” says Sarsgaard. “To me, awards are for movies like this.”
Sarsgaard’s resumé is a well-respected mix of these more cerebral projects and large-budget flicks like Jarhead or The Batman. He still harbors a deep appreciation for a good action sequence, but also viscerally remembers the stage of his career that required a bit of “sucking it up,” as it were. At home, he and Gyllenhaal joking refer to the process as getting the caribou. “In the past, for a woman with an acting career like [Maggie’s], the industry would look at her decision to take a role in something not that great differently than they would look at me, a man,” he explains. “So I’d go away and make a movie and come back with a big caribou, which gave her the opportunity to stay true to what she believed in. I took a lot of pride in doing that for us.”
He’s on the promotional rounds alongside Chastain, which also has offered an opportunity to get to know her — something that did not happen on set. In the film, Sylvia is often antagonistic toward Saul, and Chastain is “someone who really becomes her character,” says Sarsgaard. They didn’t interact much outside of rehearsal and filming, and he describes their wrap day, with a laugh, as “the craziest way I’ve ever wrapped with someone.” The two were shooting a scene on a New York subway platform, standing about 15 feet apart, and then simply waved at each other from a distance when the cameras stopped rolling: “It was very honest between us, in that way.” Now that they’ve had the chance to celebrate the movie on the circuit — especially during the SAG-AFTRA strike, when because of waivers they were able to promote their work — he says she’s nothing like her character. “She’s championed me in a way that no one ever has, and I owe her an enormous amount,” he says.
Memory will be released theatrically in December, and soon after that, Sarsgaard will be called upon to promote David E. Kelley’s Presumed Innocent, the miniseries that he filmed with brother-in-law Jake Gyllenhaal just before the work stoppage. The project comes nearly two decades after they first worked together on Jarhead, and it brought an opportunity for the two to be more equal onscreen than that initial experience. “At that time I’d been dating his sister for a couple years and I was really doing the movie to spend time with my future brother-in-law; I was pretty grumpy on that set because it was a big time commitment for not very much stuff to do,” he says. “It was a lot of rifle-cleaning, which my ego did not enjoy.”
He’ll then report to the set of his wife’s next project (rumored to be a Netflix remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, though he plays it coy on the details). It’s a lot of attention on him, and Sarsgaard is keen to point out these stakes are not normal for him. “I’ve done several movies that didn’t receive any attention, and those are the movies that if someone comes up to me on the sidewalk and mentions, I’ll sit there and have a half-hour conversation with them,” says Sarsgaard. “When a movie has a small audience, I feel very happy to meet that audience.”
This story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Music news magazine. Click here to subscribe.
