The movie Peter Sarsgaard hated every second of making: “I didn’t enjoy it”
Not many films have divided critics in recent memory quite as much as The Bride, the gory gothic romance starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale that Maggie Gyllenhaal directed and handed a role in to her husband Peter Sarsgaard, and unfortunately, that has filtered through to the box office.
At the moment, the movie is on track to lose tens of millions of dollars despite a star-packed cast that also included Penelope Cruz and Annette Bening, and it will no doubt be a disappointment for Sarsgaard, who has backed his other half by appearing in both of her movies so far, including 2021’s The Lost Daughter, which Gyllenhaal also wrote and produced.
But then, Sarsgaard has plenty of other stuff to keep him busy, some of which have some family connections which more than make up for it. For one, he’s going to be in Road House 2, which stars Maggie’s brother Jake in the role once played by the late Patrick Swayze, plus he’s doing a lot of TV work too, with a part in the recent HBO comedy DTF St Louis with David Harbour and Jason Bateman and Neuromancer, a dystopian sci-fi adapted from a 1980s novel co-starring Callum Turner.
Sarsgaard is obviously happy on television, having worked on the small screen for some 31 years now, a master at doing those ‘expert in a raincoat and glasses’ characters who turn up and deliver a withering precis of a situation that brings everyone back to reality. He did it superbly in the Emmy-nominated series The Looming Tower in 2018, and in 2013’s acclaimed Scandi adaptation The Killing.
In terms of movies, he was excellent recently in the little-seen but very good September 5 from 2024, in which he played an increasingly stressed US network president directing live TV from Munich in the midst of the 1972 Olympic massacre, and he also won the Volpi cup for his performance in Memory alongside Jessica Chastain the previous year, playing a man suffering from the onset of dementia. He also continued the family connections back in 2022 when he appeared in The Batman as District Attorney Gil Colson, some 14 years after his wife played an assistant DA in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
Three years before that, he had lined up alongside one of cinema’s greatest, Jodie Foster, for an airborne thriller that raked in huge money from the box office despite poor reviews on its release, 2005’s Flightplan, about a widowed woman flying her husband’s body home with her six year-old daughter, who she suddenly discovers is missing on the plane with no record of her having boarded. Sarsgaard plays a Federal Air Marshall in the film, which grossed over $220m worldwide on a budget of just $50m.
He recalled filming being something of an ordeal, however, telling Chud: “You shoot a movie like this, and you walk down the stairs from one scene, and they don’t have the downstairs built yet. A long time later, they pick up downstairs coming through, it’s like just trying to remember a lot of what you’re doing.”
Asked if the experience of spending days on a pretend airliner was claustrophobic, he added, “Yeah. I didn’t enjoy it. It was on a soundstage and in a tube on a soundstage with a lot of extras, all sitting there all day long.”
The filmmakers used the interiors of both the Boeing 747 and Airbus A380 as a guide to build the movie’s set, with camera dollies running up and down the galleys and hinged walls and ceilings to allow for different filming angles. As for the storyline, many accused it of essentially being a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, about a woman who goes missing onboard a train, with only one woman remembering her.
