From a shady district attorney in “The Batman” to a real-life rapist in “Boys Don’t Cry” and a harrowing disembodied voice in “The Guilty,” Peter Sarsgaard is often known for characters teetering on the edge of morality. But the actor is quick to shrug off any black-and-white labels of good versus evil.
Sarsgaard, who recently appeared in the Apple TV+ series “Presumed Innocent” and now leads the indie “Coup!,” told IndieWire that he’s wary of the villain label despite audiences wanting to classify characters a certain way.
“It’s funny because for me, obviously with ‘Presumed Innocent‘ now, to me I’m not a villain in that. I’m just a guy who lives by himself. I’m playing a decent person in that,” Sarsgaard said. “I’m playing a decent person in ‘Memory,’ the movie that I won the Golden Cup [the Best Actor award at the 2023 Venice Film Festival] for. I’m playing a decent person in ‘Dopesick.’ To me, it’s very rare where I feel like I’m playing an actual villain.”
Sarsgaard had one caveat: “In ‘The Green Lantern,’ I felt like I was playing a villain. Obviously, I had a lot of prosthetics on. But it’s really rare where you feel like you’ve been cast as the villain, for me, anyways.”
The “An Education” and “The Batman” actor added that even during the press tour for the twisty thriller “Presumed Innocent,” he fielded questions labeling his prosecutor-attorney character “creepy,” which Sarsgaard disagreed with.
“During the run of ‘Presumed Innocent,’ I did a Q&A at one point, and someone was like, ‘How are you so creepy?’ and stuff, and I really object to it,” Sarsgaard said. “Most of the characters that I play, I have my arm around them. They’re right there with me. I just find it more satisfying also [to do that].”
And despite playing a private cook who serves up sabotage to his classist employer (Billy Magnussen) in directors Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s 1918-set “Coup!,” Sarsgaard saw the humanity in a character who was just trying to get by, mind games and all. As Magnussen’s pompous writer character Jay Horton recoils at the thought of eating animals, Sarsgaard’s Floyd Monk slaughters a deer and serves it up bloody. Of course, it doesn’t help that Floyd is also enlisting a coup among his fellow servants on Jay’s isolated estate amid the Spanish influenza pandemic.
“I don’t really believe that much in, like, ‘villains,’” he said. “There have been some people who have been so colossally fucked up mentally in the history of the world that all they did was horrible things, and I guess we can call them villains. But they were born babies and all that. I don’t think any babies are born villains, so I think at some point, they became one. [Playing it any other way] would be boring for me.”
There was a “romanticism” to the role of playing a nomadic cook in “Coup!” that inspired Sarsgaard to craft a hodgepodge of ingredients for the character, including encompassing his own harmonica and culinary skills. (“I don’t think he’s necessarily a great cook. He’s the kind of cook that I am, where there are like 12 things that I make where people are like, ‘That was pretty good.’”)
Sarsgaard joined “Coup!” at the suggestion of his “Presumed Innocent” co-star and real-life brother-in-law Jake Gyllenhaal, who had starred with “Coup!” actor and executive producer Billy Magnussen in “Velvet Buzzsaw” and most recently “Road House.”
“In terms of the size of movie and the way we were going to have shoot it, I knew that I would need to be acting with someone that was light on their feet, not precious, and just willing to go with the flow,” Sarsgaard said of working with Magnussen. “I love doing that kind of thing. For me, doing a movie like this is like being shot out of a canon and for some reason, I enjoy that.”
Sarsgaard told IndieWire that he opts to work with rising auteurs over “A-list directors” who run potentially more rigid productions.
“There are some actors that will only work with A-list directors who have done the most famous movies of all time, and for me, I think that would be like being in a gilded, golden jail,” Sarsgaard said. “Even amongst very famous directors who I’ve worked with, I sometimes will think, ‘I’ve been on so many [more] movie sets and TV shows than you have. I’ve seen people do it so many different ways.’ That’s interesting and exciting.”
Sarsgaard added of the appeal of indies, “I really am someone who, even on bigger movies, I’ll do a take and be like, ‘Can’t we go do another scene now?‘ Especially a lot of scenes that don’t feel like they require a lot of deep exploration. But, of course, you shoot it for three days because the camera department wants to shoot it for three days. So movies like this [‘Coup!’] are held up or held down by the acting, even though they don’t have elaborate cinematography and stuff to carry them. I’m always game for new experiences with new people. I’ve had some of the best times of my career doing that.”
Magnussen agreed, telling IndieWire that while “Coup!” could never “compete” with blockbusters of the size of the MCU, this feature is driven instead by passion rather than a box office goal.
“We can’t compete against ‘Deadpool & Wolverine.’ We’re not a $150 million movie or whatever it cost,” Magnussen said. “We’re a small, independent feature with just a bunch of people that were passionate about it. Our prop person is 21 years old and was doing a fantastic job. People were coming in and not making the money that most people do, because we just didn’t have it, but they love the work so much, and they loved the script. They showed up every day, in the cold, just getting it down. I couldn’t be more grateful for that, just being part of that community.”
Magnussen, like Sarsgaard, is also known for playing questionable antagonists; also like Sarsgaard, he took issue with the murkiness of a “villain” label.
“No one is a villain in their own story. They’re just living the best they can,” Magnussen said. “Both characters [in ‘Coup!’] are living the best they can … What I love about this film is that it puts the audience in the seat of these characters. Both characters are doing sketchy shit, but they’re both trying to survive in a boiling pot situation. I don’t think anyone is a villain in their own life, and I think that’s what Peter and I do well … we play the character.”
He added of the class politics onscreen, “The hypocrisy between what you do and what you say you do. This thing with society and people in ‘higher positions of power’ saying, ‘We’re all equal, we’re all the same, as long as it’s my rules and in my favor.’ But it’s not. That’s totally being stolen away from [my character]. He’s realizing that his position of being equal is not real.”
“Coup!” premieres in theaters Friday, August 2from Greenwich Entertainment.
