‘September 5’ Star Peter Sarsgaard on His “Rabbit Brain,” Live TV News and Why Wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Bride’ Is So “Punk”
It’s summer for celebrities, too, and Peter Sarsgaard just had his hands dirty with a hobby typical of the current season: gardening. On a recent August morning, the veteran star (who is also a beekeeper) broke away from “harvesting a bunch of perennials and annuals” at his New York home to hop on Zoom with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the latest thing he harvested at his day job.
Sarsgaard is among the stars in Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, a thrilling recreation of the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Fehlbaum’s film, a selection of both the Venice Film Festival and Telluride, focuses on how the events played out inside a production hub in Munich and is told through the lens of the ABC Sports TV journalists who were covering it in real-time.
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Sarsgaard talked to THR about his interest in history, playing a famous U.S. news personality and why Christian Bale is a leader on set.
I read that you majored in history, so it makes sense that you might be drawn to a film like this. How did it come into your hands and why did you say yes?
To say I was a major in anything is largely not true. [Laughs] I didn’t graduate from college, so I am an enthusiast in a number of different subjects. I’m always someone who, from the time I was young, have always been a curious person. I went off on my own to learn things though I did very poorly in school. When this came into my hands, the first thing I noticed was that Sean Penn was producing it. The first movie I ever did, Dead Man Walking, was with Sean Penn. I’ve kept in touch with him over the years, and he’s someone I greatly admire both as an actor and as a person.
Then I met Tim Fehlbaum. I really loved this idea that he had for the movie, which was using documentary footage [from the attack] and integrating it into the film. He also had this totally insane attention to detail on everything. There’s not one piece of equipment that is not completely authentic. We shot on a stage but everything you see is from that period. I don’t think he would’ve done the movie if he hadn’t gotten all of the equipment. I also really liked the idea that we would be acting in a movie mixed with the documentary and news footage, which informed the acting we had to do. The scenes cut to [ABC Sports anchor] Jim McKay, who is as authentic as they come. I had done another film, Shattered Glass, which is about ethics and journalism, and I’m always interested in what the live camera has done to news as we see it today.
To me, the significant event in the movie is that while there are these live satellite cameras focused on the hostage situation, in a way they tell a story that might seem like the true story but who knows if it is. I don’t believe there is anything that is an objective truth but [live] seems to carry it with it because you hear, “We’re seeing it live,” and you think it must be the truth. I have a lot of mixed feelings about live coverage of events. But they have helped with justice in some cases, like with police brutality for example. I felt like this story was a topic worth getting into.
What is the source of those mixed feelings?
I think that we, as a species, have not talked enough about what I would call bloodlust. When we see a reporter standing out in a Category 5 hurricane, we don’t actually hope that he or she gets injured but we like the idea that they might. When we see the camera trained on the well, we wonder whether baby Jessica is dead or alive. We want her to be alive but there’s a thrill in wondering and hoping. These sort of “live events,” like the kids in the cave, create a dark side of humanity to me. There are people who can watch someone being decapitated by ISIS or watch a congressman shoot himself on live TV during a press conference.
What do those events do for our understanding of how to proceed as a group in a culture, in a society, in a democracy, or whatever system you have that’s working for you? It all requires knowledge of a common truth. We all know that these simple things are true. We might have disagreements about how to deal with them, but reality is a commonly held belief. We all know this is to be true. These little things now, deep fakes and AI and all that is entered into it, and we are really losing track of the truth, and without the truth, we can’t make informed decisions and society itself becomes fractured. That’s the problem.
You play Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports executive and producer who was in the newsroom at the time. What’s your process when you play a real person? How deep a dive do you do into their life?
I pick and choose. When I played Robert Kennedy, I worried more about my hair and my accent and even my teeth. I wore false teeth in that movie because he had very specific everything, and everybody wants you to look like that. With Roone, it didn’t matter a whole lot because not everybody knows what he looks like. I actually knew because I’m into sports. I liked his glasses so I wore his glasses. I let myself be inspired by anything from their life that I find interesting. It might be from them or from somebody I met on the street. A lot of it comes from me. With Roone, I thought the balance between his job and family was particularly interesting because he was one of those people who seemed like they were always working. For someone so successful, he really did have a deep connection with his family. Roone also got really into the human interest of sports. He made sports appealing to everyone, and then he got into news and he kind of did the same thing with news, the deep dive into the background of each person in a story.
I love a human interest story, even on things that seem like they don’t warrant it necessarily or aren’t traditionally done that way. I would love the human interest story on the average congressperson who has to talk to Marjorie Taylor Green every day like she’s a reasonable person. What does he or she say to their spouse and children? Do they contain it? When they get home and are asked, “How was work?” Do they just say that it was fine? Do they block it out? Do they go straight to the gym? A lot of the news is either prurient or sensational. “Look at the bomb go off,” which doesn’t tell me a lot.
How did you feel about shooting September 5 on a soundstage? How is that as a performer because it all feels very contained.
It’s great as a performer because the sound is always good and it’s really focused on the acting and not the scenery. You’re not in a some wide shot walking in Scotland across a big field which can be nice for a little while but it can also be boring. The view is good and it always focuses on that. This can be claustrophobic, and you may get tired of going back in there. The air quality is not always good. They wanted it to be very hot because the air conditioning had gone out in real life at that time, so we were always kind of hot and wet. But a stage is great for acting because I hate it when the take gets messed up by sound. I don’t like doing things over and over again. I usually do the first take and say, “Are we good?”
The interesting thing is that we shot it in Munich at the Bavarian Sound Studio, which is on the other side of town from where the Olympics were held. Before we started filming, I went to the site of the Olympics on one of those little electric scooters. It was actually quite a long ride on one of those but it was nice to give me a sense of it all. It’s all still there.
About not doing things over and over, I read that you like to keep it moving. You don’t like sequels or multiple seasons, you like to evolve and change and go onto the next project. Have you always been that way?
Yes. I’m the opposite of a perfectionist. It really helps with acting because I don’t try to smooth or shape something out. Even when I’m doing theater, I’m not out there honing something every night. I just kind of go for it. It’s more fun for me that way. It’s what I prefer to watch, too. I have a rabbit brain and if I do the same character for a long time, I’m going to get bored. But look at James Gandolfini. How many years did he do [The Sopranos], and he just absolutely destroyed every scene he was in. I really admire that but I’m not like that.
I read this really interesting factoid about your character, Roone. Based on his handling of the Olympics, he was promoted to president of ABC News and it was a controversial decision at the time because he didn’t have a lot of news experience, people said. As a result, there was some negative press about him, so he instructed his secretary to cut out any negative stories from the papers before he read them so he wouldn’t be exposed to them …
That’s like the way I read reviews.
I was just going to ask you about that. How do you approach what’s written about you?
I don’t read anything that’s written about me at all. I would also say that I’ve only watched about 50 percent of the movies and TV shows I’ve done because by the time [they] come out, I’m off doing something else. Like I said, I have a rabbit brain. When I go to work on something, I always like to tell people that I’m very good at saying hello but not goodbye. I can really get into it with a person at the beginning.
When I went off to camp as a kid, I would come back with a best friend but then I would never speak to them again. I moved around a lot as a kid, and I treat movies the same way. I come in, say hello and dive in with the person. We’re here to be intimate. Then on the last day when they say, “Stop,” I am gone. I have loyalty to the film but I don’t have ownership. They’ve edited it and laid music on top and it’s theirs.
I did a show called Presumed Innocent, and someone said to me recently, “You seemed really creepy” in this particular episode. I said, “I don’t remember feeling creepy at all.” I imagine they may have laid down some music and made some cuts to make it that way. The point of view that I had while working will always be my point of view. I am strictly looking at things from the character’s point of view. That’s the only point of view I have. I thought that the guy I played in Presumed Innocent was a very honorable person actually.
Did you watch Tim Fehlbaum’s previous films prior to making September 5?
Yes, I did. This one was so different. I feel like Tim is a guy who can do almost anything. I mean Tim could make a Marvel movie if he felt like it. I don’t know that he would feel like it but he certainly has that type of wild imagination and discipline that it would take to make some of those really big movies. It’s a lot of discipline. My wife is making a very large movie right now for Warner Bros., and the level of focus and discipline over such a huge amount of time is impressive.
How was your experience filming The Bride with Maggie? I read that you previously said that, “It’s a really exciting film. I’m not just saying this because it’s my wife. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read, period.”
It is true. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read. To me, it’s both a big movie for adults and a big movie that’s for teenagers. It’s what everyone hopes for and tries to solve in making a big movie. The people that are involved in every department — Christian Bale, Jessie Buckley, Annette Bening, Jonny Greenwood doing the music and Dylan Tichenor doing editing, the list goes on and on — are not just people who are great but they are real individuals with style and taste.
How was your experience working on it? You worked with Maggie on The Lost Daughter and you’ve been together for quite a long time. Do you get to pick who you want to play? How has she changed as a director?
She always says that she writes every male part with me in mind, but then she offers me the part that she thinks that I’m best suited for. The Bride is punk, and it’s fast and really emotional. Also, it’s violent at times and it’s wildly romantic. I don’t think you could say anything of those things about The Lost Daughter except for maybe that it’s briefly violent but it’s a different kind of violence. The Bride is so ambitious because the script really is one of the best scripts. Look, my wife wrote it so I’ll just go ahead and say that it’s the best script I’ve ever read. It really was satisfying on so many levels.
With Christian Bale, he’s such a phenomenal actor who has such devotion. Watching him on set… you know some actors try to stay in it. You have to call them by their character’s name and all that crap. They speak in the accent the entire time. It’s not like that with him. It is just that he can’t help but be in it. It’s not a choice. It’s not a pretension. It’s just the way that he is. That changes the set when you have that type of leadership with him and with Maggie. Then Jessie is the most abstract, random, free-flowing, in-the-moment actor you could ever work with. She can also sing and dance by the way — big time. There are big dance numbers and stuff in the movie. I’m so happy with the way that Warner Bros. has supported Maggie on the movie, too. It’s nice to work with Pam Abdy over there who I worked with on Garden State back in the day. It’s a great studio that has artistically-minded people running it.
September 5 is premiering in Venice where you won a best actor prize last year for Memory. I watched your speech again and it was so beautiful. You delivered what everyone wants from a speech by touching on family, art, emotion and making a statement with a warning about AI. Now that it’s been a year, how are you feeling about that moment and how it was received?
I was worried. I wanted to use the moment not just to say something I believed in, but to be human in front of people. If what I was talking about was the threat of AI, what I wanted to present was what AI doesn’t look like and what AI can’t do. I didn’t want to be emotional particularly, but I wanted to be myself as deeply as I could. I woke up that morning and before I even got out of bed, I just started writing down what I wanted to say, and I kind of wrote it all in one go while still in bed, handwritten. I read it to Maggie and Alba Rohrwacher and I got emotional reading it to them. I then actually rewrote it to try to make it easier for myself to say without being emotional as somebody who is an emotional person. When I went up there, I actually told myself to take an unreasonable amount of time. That really helped because I really am not somebody who enjoys talking in front of large groups of people. I like acting when I act on stage but I find the bows to be the most confrontational, difficult moments because what you’re supposed to do exactly is unclear. The only person I’ve ever seen bow in a way that I wish I could was Vanessa Redgrave when she was doing Vita & Virginia with Eileen Atkins. It was when I first came to the city and she came in for her bow, and she really let it be for her. I was like, that’s the truth. It’s the false humility thing that I don’t like.
The last question I have is about your career. I was revisiting your credits and looking back at all your brilliant work. I noticed that your first credit came in 1995 which means you’re approaching 30 years as an actor. Do you take a moment to recognize that or consider what you still want to accomplish? A director you still want to work with? Or does the milestone mean anything to you?
To me, it always feels like the beginning. I can’t talk about it yet but just yesterday I agreed to do a movie that’s going to be next summer with an actress and a director who are people I’m really eager to learn something from and collaborate with. I have a hard time looking back. It makes me feel like I’m dying. I’m always jazzed looking forward to what’s to come. It makes it hard for me to watch any of my things that I did even a year ago because it seems like history. I hope to keep getting better as an actor. I think I have gotten better as an actor as I’ve gone along. I just want to keep improving. That’s what I mainly want to do. Thirty years, though, wow. That’s a fun thing to be able to say, especially if someone is disrespecting me on set. I can say, “I’ve been doing this 30 years!” I might start to throw that down now.
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