“Acting? There’s nothing to say,” Peter Sarsgaard tells me. “If you’re talking about acting you’re usually just bitching and moaning, right? Ha ha! That’s a description of every conversation between people in the same profession. It’s always a conversation about what that guy got that I didn’t get.”
Not so much. Sarsgaard seems pretty level-headed about his profession. Now 53, that gentle voice unchanged away from the camera, he conveys articulate bemusement about his status as an offbeat movie star. He is serious about the work but, clearly, is not above revelling in occasional absurdities.
He broke through in the late 1990s with films such as The Man in the Iron Mask and Boys Don’t Cry. Before long he’d cornered a place as a leading man who can also do sinister antagonist. Romancing a younger Carey Mulligan in An Education. Bobby Kennedy in Jackie. Belated awards recognition came with the best-actor award at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival, for Memory.
“For me, there were many breakthroughs,” Sarsgaard says, amiably.
Venice has been good to him. A year after that triumph he arrived back at the Lido with Tim Fehlbaum’s gripping September 5. The picture was not initially on many radars. But word got out about this fascinating German-US coproduction about ABC Sports’ TV coverage of the Black September attack on the Munich Olympics of 1972. The film, nominated for an Oscar for its screenplay, is taut, economic and rigorously researched.
Sarsgaard plays Roone Arledge, then president of the US TV network’s sports division, the official who, previously tasked with switching from swimming pool to dressage arena, had to improvise a live news report when Palestinian militants broke into the Israel team’s accommodation at the Olympic Village, killed two of its members and took another nine hostage. Procedures that would now require merely a flick of a switch then required ingenious improvisations. A huge studio camera has to be wheeled out to a balcony to relay live images of the apartment. One satellite is shared between all the American networks. It is a thumping story well told.
“It asks what seems like a lot of very naive questions,” Sarsgaard says. “I was talking to my daughter the other day. I said, ‘I grew up for most of my young life, all the way past college, without a cell phone.’ I also grew up, until I was around 13, without cable television. We had four stations to look at. So the way we got information was through a fairly narrow channel.”
This is hammered home in an extraordinary sequence that shows live TV footage of the security officials gathering outside the accommodation with a plan to overpower the captors. Modern audiences are sure to wonder if those inside are watching these images on TV. We live in an age where anything streamed on one observer’s phone is instantly available everywhere. Yet it doesn’t seem to occur to the ABC team that the Black September guerrillas could be watching US TV.
“They were, apparently,” Sarsgaard confirms. “And I think it’s just so interesting that they didn’t even think about it. Now we’d be watching it on our cell phones. That idea of the news becoming part of the story is happening now all the time. That’s not even something we concern ourselves with. We know the news is part of this story. Even after the thing happens you might have some version of the news that justifies an action. Then you might have some version of the news that criticises an action.”
A great deal about contemporaneous US media was, of course, far from satisfactory, but September 5 reminds us that the public was still getting its information almost exclusively from trained journalists who checked sources and ran copy through professional editors. There is fraught discussion here about what they will do if someone gets shot live on air.
“Now they show it online,” Sarsgaard says, who points to the notorious killing of an American journalist by Islamist militants in 2002.
“Someone my wife knew was working with an actor on a play when Daniel Pearl was beheaded. The actor saw it – because you could see it – and he came into work and he was able to perform. But just barely. Why does that have to be available? What does that really do for any of us?”
There is another implicit commentary on contemporary media ethics in the closing moments. The militants ended up killing the nine hostages during a failed rescue attempt. September 5 reveals that one of the ABC team took the decision to broadcast early, shakily confirmed reports that the Israelis had all been safely extracted. An apology follows. The world acknowledges the error. In 2025 conspiracy theories would immediately emerge suggesting ... what? Well, everything. Most obviously that the hostages were still alive somewhere.
“Exactly. If you make the mistake it will live out there,” Sarsgaard says. “The mistake is certainly interesting. With a live camera what you get is, of course, rolling 24-hour coverage. When I think of 24-hour live coverage of an event I think of a reporter with his face right up against the wall. You can’t see much if the wall is right up against your face. You need perspective. That is something we don’t have much of these days.”
It hardly needs to be said that the subject matter alone has kicked up some controversy. This is not the first time the Munich massacre has been covered on screen. Kevin Macdonald’s definitive documentary One Day in September won an Academy Award in 2000. Five years later Steven Spielberg’s Munich dealt with the savage aftermath.
But the continuing slaughter in Gaza has caused some to yell “Zionist propaganda” in the current film’s direction. The Hollywood Reporter suggested that Toronto International Film Festival “outright rejected September 5 ... ostensibly because it might generate controversy related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. This is the world in which we now live.
“It has a Swiss director. We have German producers and we have American producers, but I don’t think any of them are Zionists so far as I know,” Sarsgaard says wearily. “How about this? Once somebody says it’s that, and they put it on the internet, then that will be the truth to some people. The truth is that we made this well before that happened.”
September 5 premiered less than a year after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7th, 2023. There was plainly no way the film could have been put into production as a response. Yet the conspiracy theories gather.
“We definitely got together and talked about what it meant,” Sarsgaard says. “Could the film still deliver its message, which was about journalism, with the heavy weight of these recent events? My position has always been that what was true in 1971 is still true today – about the Palestinians and the Israelis. It amplifies what we’re talking about. It doesn’t change what we’re talking about. So that was really the important thing to me: that it didn’t derail the message of the film. And I really don’t think it does.”
Sarsgaard, born in Illinois, was a decent soccer player as a teenager, but he shifted his ambitions to acting after suffering one too many uncomfortable concussions. He dabbled in improvisation while at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and then, like so many potential bohemians, shifted himself to New York City.
“It’s the time in your life when you can do that,” he says wistfully. “And I lived in people’s apartments and sublet people’s apartments, sometimes without paying. I actually lived in [the REM singer] Michael Stipe’s apartment. I knew his friend, who was his kind of assistant, and he was never there. And it wasn’t furnished, and he knows now that I did it.”
His first job was performing with the avant-garde vocalist Meridith Monk. Months followed “going from couch to couch and eating pizza”. It was an exiting period. He secured his Screen Actors Guild card with a job on Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking. Then, in 1998, he landed in The Man in the Iron Mask, a lavish adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel.
“I was around all these professional actors: Jeremy Irons, Gabriel Byrne, Gérard Depardieu etc. And it got to be, like, ‘Oh, this is what a bunch of actors who’ve been doing it a long time look like. Ha ha! They all acted pretty crazy. But Boys Don’t Cry was the first time anybody was, like, ‘Oh, that’s who that is?’”
Kimberly Peirce’s film earned Hilary Swank an Oscar for her role as a trans man who falls victim to Sarsgaard’s violent ex-con. Following that eye-catchingly unpleasant role, he was always there or thereabouts. Most years we get three or four Sarsgaard flicks. He is rarely the romantic lead, despite being a good-looking fellow, but he is never anything other than memorable. In 2009 he married Maggie Gyllenhaal, the actor and director, and they now have two children. It is good to be with someone in the same line of work, but I trust they are able to talk about other things when they are at home in front of the telly.
“I try not to talk about it very much when I’m not doing it,” he says. “Sometimes, if you had a bad day at work, you mention it to your partner. But directing is a different thing. You know, Maggie’s directing this movie right now, The Bride! She’s editing it and stuff. So it’s very helpful to talk about it. And I enjoy talking about it.”
I do indeed know about The Bride! Gyllenhaal has moved into film-making with notable success. The Lost Daughter, her debut as director, won best screenplay at Venice (the family really do well at that event) and went on to receive three Oscar nominations, including one for Jessie Buckley as best supporting actress. The Kerry woman now takes over the role of the Bride of Frankenstein from Elsa Lanchester in a variation on James Whale’s legendary 1935 sequel to his own version of Mary Shelley’s novel. Christian Bale is the Creature. Penélope Cruz and Annette Bening also star.
“Jimi Hendrix was a lot more than a guitarist,” Sarsgaard, who plays a detective in The Bride!, says. “Jessie Buckley is a lot more than just an actress. Even in the quality of her acting sometimes. The rest of us are just playing the guitar. Hers is on fire and she’s picking it with her tongue. Ha ha! I just think she’s monumental in this movie. That’s the main thing I have to say about The Bride!”
Fair enough. And no bitching or moaning to speak of.
September 5 is in cinemas from Thursday, February 6th
