Peter Sarsgaard is getting rave reviews for his latest dark characters: a porn star’s manipulative husband in the biopic Lovelace and the violent yet sympathetic death row inmate in the AMC series The Killing.
In a recent interview, the actor said connecting with his audience felt like a reward.
“It’s like, ‘Yay, I did a good job! That’s fantastic’.”
In Lovelace, which opens today, Sarsgaard is Chuck Traynor, husband of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace.
As Lovelace later alleged, the film shows Traynor coercing his wife into the pornography business and physically and emotionally abusing her, even forcing her to have sex with other men.
Amanda Seyfried, who plays Lovelace, called Sarsgaard’s Traynor “malicious and selfish”. Castmate Debi Mazar said when in character, Sarsgaard was “terrifying and creepy” on set.
In TV’s The Killing, which had its season finale on August 4, Sarsgaard played Ray Seward, who swings from fits of uncontrollable rage and maliciously gleeful taunts to surprisingly vulnerable and sympathetic displays while on death row for killing his wife.
While both characters are violent, to Sarsgaard they are “wildly different”.
“Ray would not hang out with Chuck for five minutes and would have no respect for him whatsoever,” he said.
To Sarsgaard, Chuck is a “lost” man who thinks he’s found something real with Lovelace and turns violent when he “feels like he’s losing her” and becomes jealous of the attention she gets.
Sarsgaard described Ray as “very disciplined”, with “a kind of inner nobility” and “strong ideas about what’s right and wrong”.
Finding the nuances in seemingly seamy, broken characters is already a speciality for Sarsgaard, who gained notice with his portrayal of edgy characters such as the homophobic John Lotter in Boys Don’t Cry and truth-challenged Charles Lane in Shattered Glass.
Sarsgaard said seeing the dark and light in a character was “being like a realist” because if “you look at people every day, you see both things all the time”. – Sapa-AP