It’s mentioned on the Wikipedia entry for Peter Sarsgaard that he wanted to be a football player while growing up.
“Soccer,” the actor quickly corrects. “Probably somebody who was British wrote ‘football.’ “
For some, too, there might be confusion about the actor’s career, which has zigged and zagged since his breakthrough role as a homophobic redneck in Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 “Boys Don’t Cry.”
In the last decade, Sarsgaard has made his mark in a number of films. He was a conflicted journalist in 2003’s “Shattered Glass,” a researcher who has a homosexual moment with Liam Neeson’s title character in the biopic “Kinsey,” a distraught soldier in the 2005 film “Jarhead,” and has had roles in the thrillers “Flightplan” and “Rendition” and in offbeat semicomedies like “Garden State” and “Year of the Dog.”
Last fall, he made his Broadway debut in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” and recently shared the stage with his fiancee, Maggie Gyllenhaal, in an off-Broadway production of “Uncle Vanya.” None of this necessarily screams out leading-man type, but it makes for an interesting career path, one that the actor seems content to take.
“Actors don’t get to decide these things, you know,” Sarsgaard notes. “Life happens to us.”
His latest film role is that of Cleveland, an enigmatic and charming small-time hood in “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel that opened in Los Angeles and New York on Friday. It also stars Sienna Miller as Cleveland’s alcoholic upper-crust girlfriend and Jon Foster as a young college grad named Art whose life they take over. Nick Nolte plays Art’s mobster dad.
“Pittsburgh” – set in 1983 – was a longtime project of director Rawson Marshall Thurber (“Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story”), who says that he had always envisioned Sarsgaard for the role of Cleveland.
Thurber was so psyched to get the actor cast that while writing the script he asked Chabon to check out Sarsgaard in the film “Garden State,” and a few days later the author e-mailed him back saying, “Dude. Peter is Cleveland.” Sarsgaard was to the first one signed for the film.
At the time the role was being offered, Sarsgaard and Gyllenhaal were about to have their first child, and the actor says he thought it was a good idea to play someone so self-absorbed.
“I was really into the idea of playing somebody who is so expansive, doing whatever he wanted without caring what anybody thought of him,” he said. “Every actor gets interested in a role like that. There are no restrictions; you can do anything.”
To prepare, Sarsgaard began thinking about the films of Serbian director Emir Kusturica (“Black Cat, White Cat”), which often feature gypsies.
“It’s a culture that doesn’t live by the same rules as a lot of other cultures, but the sense of community they have is exclusive. … They live by their own rules,” he said.
The 37-year-old actor grew up as something of a gypsy. Because of his father’s jobs – first in the Air Force and then with IBM and Monsanto – Sarsgaard moved around a lot in his youth.
“I was born in Illinois, lived in St. Louis for 10 years, Oklahoma for a couple years, Connecticut for a couple years, Memphis, also Arkansas,” he says, seemingly trying to remember all the places.
“I got into acting because I couldn’t play soccer anymore. I had sustained a number of injuries. I had gotten a couple of concussions. And I kind of dropped out from playing. I”
While attending Washington University in St. Louis, the Actors Studio program came to town. “I heard famous people were going to be teaching these classes, and they wanted some nonactors in the class,” he said. “I ended up doing a bunch of plays in college.”
He then won an award, which allowed him to go to New York City, where playwright Horton Foote cast him in a play of his one of his plays.
“From then on, it was the path of least resistance,” Sarsgaard said.
Sarsgaard says he likes to be able to do a play every year or so between film gigs. He and Gyllenhaal, an accomplished stage actress herself, who was last seen on screen in the summer blockbuster “The Dark Knight,” told The New York Times in February that they they would like to work together more often if there were more opportunities like at the small off-Broadway theater where “Vanya” ran.
That is, if the couple – who have been together since 2001 and live in New York City – can ensure that they don’t spend too much time away from their daughter, Ramona, who is 2 1/2.
Asked if he enjoys being a father, Sarsgaard seems to light up, enthusiastically answering, “I do, I do.”
And is he gooing to teach his daughter soccer?
“I am. Every child that I have must play soccer,” laughs Sarsgaard, who says he still plays pickup games and kicks the ball around the house. “I’m one of those people who’s constantly chipping the ball over the kitchen island trying to land it into a basket of Ramona’s toys – taking out wine glasses and things.”
Sarsgaard will benext be seen next onscreen in “Orphan,” a horror flick with Vera Farmiga that’s set for summer, and later in the year in “An Education,” which won an Audience Choice award at Sundance. It was written by Nick Hornsby (“High Fidelity”). In the film, which is set in London during the early 1960 s, Sarsgaard plays a playboy who seduces a 17-year-old girl.
But Sarsgaard seems remarkably sunny for an actor who is known for ferociously digging into roles that explore the darker side of human nature.
And, no, he says he doesn’t have an explanation for why he’s has been cast as a conflicted soul so often, although he says, “I think I could be funny.”
To be fair, though, the character of Cleveland does possess a lot of wit, but it remains a mystery to Sarsgaard as to why the “Pittsburgh” filmmakers were so keen on having him.
“You never understand what other people are seeing in you,” he said. “I don’t spend a lot of time figuring that out.”
