Story by Alex Frank
Photography by Brian Bowen Smith
Styling by Ilaria Urbinati
Grooming by Barbara Guillaume
Production by Emily Chavous Foster

“Filmmakers are driven to stories about an ordinary person doing something extraordinary, or an extraordinary person stooping to do something ordinary. … But Robert is not presuming to do anything extraordinary. He’s just living,” Edgerton says. “People pay attention to singers and actors and famous people, and Instagram will teach us that people want to follow somebody. But I think under the surface of everybody’s life, there’s a tale that’s worth telling.”

Adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Train Dreams finds a kind of radiance in Robert’s ordinariness. He meets and marries Gladys, played by Felicity Jones, and the two build a home amid the arcadian trees of  the Pacific Northwest. Together with a ragtag crew laying  track across the frontier, he helps forge America’s future. Even so, they’re destined to be forgotten by history — when one dies, his boots are nailed to a tree as proof  that he existed. Then the men go right back to work.

“If I was ever going to make a biopic, this is it,” Bentley says. “It wouldn’t be about the person who invents the thing that changes history. It’s a worthwhile thing to make a biopic about a working-class person who’d never have something made about them.”

Edgerton was partly drawn to the character because he himself descends from guys like Robert. His great-grandparents lived in rural Australia. “They were sheep farmers,” Edgerton says. “I have these old black-and-white photographs of my great-grandfather on a farm outside of Sydney, on the back of a wagon driven by about 24 cattle transporting these epic bales of wool.”

By the time Joel came around, that past had mostly vanished. His father, in his college days, switched his major from animal husbandry to law and decamped to Sydney for better business prospects. Joel had, by his own account, a charmed life, with the chance to try on different pursuits — sports, art, and, ultimately, acting. “I was OK at school. I wasn’t amazing at it. It’s just that it didn’t really interest me,” he says. That’s when he found drama. “Acting was a way to be seen, I think. Then I realized I really enjoyed it.”

Opportunity came knocking close to home. George Lucas filmed some of  the Star Wars prequel trilogy in Australia and was looking to fill out the cast. After auditioning, Edgerton won the small but substantial part of Owen Lars in Episodes II and III. “I think it was on my 26th birthday I found out I got that job,” Edgerton remembers. He used his newfound connection to the blockbuster franchise to make his way to Hollywood. “Some part of me was smart enough to know that I could bluff my way into some meetings because I was in Star Wars,” he says. “It allowed me to explore the other side of  the ocean.”

Once in Los Angeles, he enjoyed the hustle. “I had this air of confidence about me, but I was also riddled with self-doubt. I wasn’t really setting goals for myself. I hadn’t really thought about what would come next,” he says. Still, even the bad auditions didn’t faze him. “It became a way to test your own mettle. I had a really good attitude about it: You win some and you lose some. I was careful not to let my ego drive the whole process. If I missed out on something, I wasn’t  going to let it mean that I was a bad actor.”

Slowly but surely, Edgerton built a résumé of scene-stealing parts, becoming a reliable bolt of electricity even when he wasn’t the  “main dish.” As a Navy SEAL in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 political thriller Zero Dark Thirty, he embodies the lethal focus of a man trained to move without hesitation. As the vengeful Buchanan in Gatsby, he plays the role like a simmering pot about to boil over. “Some of my most fun experiences have been letting the lid off a little bit, turning the dial up, [embracing] the freedom of  being louder and more dynamic,” he says.

Beneath the brawn, Macy was struck by Edgerton’s restraint and nuance in Train Dreams, an authenticity that felt true to how real people react to the world. “His emotions don’t go too high, and they don’t go too low. He tries to live in that middle part, which I thought was a brilliant choice, because the effect is that he’s stoical,” Macy says. “Joel was all about nose to the grindstone — get the job done. He’s got deep, deep emotions, but he wouldn’t let them get in the way of  doing his job.”

The character Robert is a quiet man, not prone to revealing his fears and desires, though they churn just beneath the surface. Edgerton’s ability to convey volumes in silence dazzled Bentley; his eyes seemed alive with all the things that Robert felt but never said. “Not many actors can be completely silent and with a look, you feel such an internal life coming out of him,” Bentley says. “It’s a mysterious and magical thing.”

He also admired Edgerton’s mastery of  body language and microexpression. “He’s very self-aware of his tools as an actor. He talked to [cinematographer] Adolpho [Veloso] and me early on, like, ‘This sort of emotion comes better out of this side of my face, and that side of emotion comes better out of the other side of my face,’ ” Bentley says. “He can do so much with so little.”

Edgerton’s career shows a rare adaptability, a naturalism that allows him to slip seamlessly between genres, from medieval fantasy epics like 2021’s The Green Knight with Dev Patel to the Apple TV+ sci-fi series Dark Matter, opposite Jennifer Connelly, returning soon for a second season. In 2016’s  Loving, about  the real-life couple behind the landmark Supreme Court case that struck down bans on interracial marriage, he landed a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of a sensitive, dignified husband caught in a firestorm. The film also was recognized at  the Palm Springs International Film Awards, where Edgerton presented co-star Ruth Negga with the Rising  Star award.

When he approaches a role, he thinks less about transformation and more about calibration. “It’s a question of  what do I want to bring to the performance — like the  equalizer on a sound system, the treble and the bass,” he says. “I feel like my intuition gets incrementally better each time I go to work.”

Edgerton met his wife, Christine Centenera, editor-in-chief of Vogue Australia, in his early 20s. They were friends for years — his intense focus and constant travel made dating hard. “I was just like, ‘I don’t think Christine would ever see me as relationship material.’ She knew too much about my complicated life with relationships, which acting was partly to blame for,” he says. “I spent many years of my life being so interested in work that it became the most important thing.”

When they finally fell into a romance, they found a rhythm that works. “We move in different spheres, but we understand the mechanics of  it and the geographical complications of it all,” he says. The couple and their 4-year-old twins split time between Australia and London, though Edgerton has also developed a fond connection to Southern California and its creative current. When he’s here, the desert around Palm Springs — where he’s visited for health retreats, the film festival, and Coachella — provides a little hit of  home.

“The interiors of California are so vastly different from the mirage of Los Angeles. It reminds me of going on long drives in Australia, particularly when you’re out in deserted landscapes,” he says.

As Macy describes him, Edgerton is a straight-up pleasant person to be around, someone you want to spend time with between takes. They filmed Train Dreams in the towering forests of Washington state, and though Macy was on set for only a short stretch, he found in Edgerton not just a solid scene partner but a welcoming host. “He’s gregarious and he’s friendly and he’s smart — and he’s been doing it for a long time. He knows a lot of people,” Macy says. “I called him up the second I got in town. And — God bless him — he had to work the next day, but we [still] went to a bar and drank too much.”

Now, with Train Dreams, Edgerton may finally have the breakout moment that friends and colleagues have long sensed he’s earned. “It feels kind of criminal that we haven’t seen him like this before,” Bentley says. “There is this resounding sentiment: Joel deserves this. He’s as good of a guy as he is an actor, and I think that shines through.”

When his character climbs into an airplane for the first time and beholds the vastness below, there’s a bittersweet glint in Edgerton’s expression. His silence seems to say, My life happened, whether or not anyone remembers it. “Most of  us get forgotten, absorbed by the world within a generation or two,” Edgerton says. “But through Robert’s journey, my takeaway is that it’s all worth it to spend a short amount of  time on this planet.”

At 51, he’s learned his years have value. After a career of  hits and misses, he possesses that profound wellspring of  feeling — wisdom, knowledge, depth — that we all earn as the consolation prize for the bumps and bruises endured along the way. “I’ve been on sets where I’m tying my mind in knots trying to imagine how to play a moment,” he says. “Train Dreams was very instinctual. Experience fills you up with subject matter. I’ve got experiences that I can relate to and bring to work that allow me to not  turn my brain in too many pretzels.”

In other words, every mile of his own voyage led Joel Edgerton here, to a pivotal role that feels both hard-won and right on time. Of  Train Dreams, he says, “I had a feeling it’d be worth the journey.”

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