Quotes

I do want to have holidays and see my family and friends.

I can't complain about the roles that have come my way.

I am sick of living out of a suitcase.

As an actor, the first thing you learn in drama school is you never judge.

You need mystery. You actually do. I think that's what foreign women, French women in particular, are good at. There's still a sense that you need to keep some of the unknown because that's where the soul resides, or something.

In terms of publicity and interviews, well, it's really hard in this modern world to keep a sense of mystery.

My favorite part of any project is the preparation. It's where you get to meet the people, the experts.

The guy I read and I love is Irvin Yalom.

Oh yes [I had known about the 1996 Everest disaster]. In May 1996 I was acting at the Sydney Theatre, and during a rehearsal break the news was broadcast on the radio. I was so shocked that I had to go outside into the fresh air, to smoke a cigarette. I thought, "This is insane! A guy perishes on Mount Everest while his wife is carrying his child in New Zealand!" Later I read all the books about this tragedy, and since I heard about ten years ago that a film about it was planned, I really wanted to play the mountain guide Rob Hall.

I have always enjoyed mountain climbing, but not in such extreme ways as Rob [Hall], of course. After my acting studies, I even traveled to Nepal in 2004 as a young backpacker, to Kathmandu and to the base camp on Everest. I would do it again anytime and can only recommend it to everyone. The Himalayas are different from all other mountains.

I believe in what we did, and I always go back to how this story just captivated me. I was doing theater in Sydney (in 1996), and during a tech rehearsal it was on the news. I went outside for a cigarette, I was smoking in those days, and you just thought: 'There's a man dying on the top of Everest while his wife is carrying his child in Auckland.' It's the grandest of things and the smallest of things.

I remember the last job I had, apart from acting, was when Rabbit-Proof Fence came out in Australia [in 2002] and I was working as a stonemason's laborer. The movie came out [with Clarke in a small role] and I thought, I'll make a good living now. And it didn't work out that way. And even after, say, Public Enemies [in 2009], I thought this would change everything. You think something, somebody will come in, I'll get a nice big TV job, but it never does. And I'm kind of happy that it has worked out for me like that. I've had to work very hard, dig deep, and find a way to make the life that I want to live.

That's one of the challenges of acting. You can't expect that you're going to be successful, but you've got to put your heart and everything you have into it. Look at a guy like Ian McKellen, who is eighty or whatever, and he's just loving his work and you can see that in the work. That defines what type of actor you are. And what kind of people want to work with you. And whether you can do this job for a long, long time.

I did learn to shear [sheep], yes. One of the hardest jobs you can ever do, wrestling rams to the ground, them kicking and head-butting. The last time I worked with my father in the sheds I think I was nineteen. At that point, my dad was getting older, so I'd go and pull the sheep out of the pen, bring it around, push it around, sit it on its ass. Then you tuck its legs under your arms, and often with a big ram its head and its horns are sitting up around your face. Tough work, and I joke about it with Dad that he's probably shorn some of the sheep that made a lot of the wool suits I wear.

[2013] I want a big family, man. I'm not married, but I will be soon. I'd like to find a nice little farm by the beach, have some kids, sit and write a novel, and give it all away.

I come from a very, very small town. There were no other actors around. I never met any actors. A lot of those times when I'd be out in the sheds with my dad, I'd step outside and there's just nothing out there but thousands of acres, forty thousand sheep, and miles of nothing. And so my mind would just wonder about what else was out there. Then, when I was studying preliminary law at university, I'd find myself missing lectures and going and sitting in a cinema, just dreaming of different worlds. That's when it started.

I truly love not knowing how my career is going to go, or how a particular scene is going to play out. As soon as you make plans in this business, God just has a laugh at you.

I was born in a place called Winton, which is way up in Queensland [Australia], and Dad was a [sheep] shearer driving through town. He got a flat tire and met my mother, and he decided to stay. Then I came along. [What kind of sheep are we talking about?] Everything, really. I'm not sure what breed they were, because it was very transitory. We'd go around in a caravan from shed to shed for many, many years.

Is it [Serenity (2019)] perfect? No. But what the f*** is? It was massively ambitious, and it got treated very harshly. It's bizarre how people look at things nowadays. Like if Peter Greenaway was to come along now, or early Ken Loach or something - we're too cynical to understand Kes now! Or even to examine, you know, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. We're too owned by big business and Marvel to examine a film like Serenity properly.

For a long time it was impossible to have a sustainable career and buy a house and have a family just by working in Australia, so people just had to f***ing go. [But brave too, surely?] Of course, but when you're young you don't realise. You're not considering the tomorrows, you're going for the now, and it's not until you do break through and you make a living that you go, 'My god, I was close to the edge there'. But that's what it takes, you know? It's not a business for the faint-hearted. And it's not a business for those with false hearts either. If you just want to be loved or be famous, it'll break you. You've gotta love and be in it for the right thing, to tell a good story and because you enjoy being a part of that.

[upon seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover of a German Terminator 2 DVD, he bursts out laughing] That actually looks like a double! With a wig! It does!

In a world of hyperbole, I don't think it's too much to say that a 'Joel Edgerton' does not come along very often. The one thing that always rings true in anything that he's involved in it that it's worth watching.

[on fears] I'm not big on snakes. I got bitten by one when I was younger. One bit me on the ankle when I was a kid. [Interviewer: That would do it.] It did it! [Interviewer: Was it a big one?] Uh... it was big enough, you know? It hang on [clicks his tongue]. Not all of them [do this]. I just remember I ran in to get a ball and it sunk its teeth in, and off to hospital to get an injection. Sheep shearing and snake bites, yeah, I know, I know! [laughs]

No, I just came here [United States] and stayed [as opposed to going back to Australia afterwards]. There's a couple of things, I think, on my biography that are not me, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I grew up in the outback, Australia. And I could shear a sheep. Well, I don't know if I still could now, but I could learn to.

[on filming Everest (2015)] And, at 4:30 am in the dark, somebody better be funny, you know? [Interviewer: Who is the funny one?] Oh, Brolin is seriously funny, Josh Brolin is one of the funniest guys I've ever met, oh my God.

You play such scenes very intensely, I wanted to convey Rob Hall's compassion, intelligence & strength.

[on trying out a Trophy Truck owned by Robert Acer] It freaked me out. I was like, 'Whoa whoa whoa, put the brake on! I can't see f--king anything over there, let alone where the track is.' [Did you hit the top speed of 255kh?] [I am not sure but] I was going fast enough for my a--s to tighten.

I knew the story [of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster]. I remember where I was when I heard it was happening, and because it unfolded over a number of days, it gave people time to think about it and imagine the full horror. The story is so affecting, and I had a real emotional connection to it.

[Mountaineer David Breashears: When I am watching this film [Everest (2015)], I am seeing Rob (Hall) again.] You are making me blush, dude.

If it wasn't going to happen, I would have gone and done something else. I don't think there's any point sitting around and being a suffering or frustrated actor.

I love working with Balt [Everest (2015) director Baltasar Kormákur]. He allowed me to bring my energy, and I'm obsessed with getting my ducks in a row and my facts straight. He was great at filtering that and moving me just to do it. He led the way, hiking up the Himalayas, and he's absolutely the right guy for this.

[After graduating from Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne I felt] like a baby in the new world; it's cold and weird and there's the reality of this, that and the other and you struggle for a long time.

My father was a sheep shearer, so I grew up in a caravan; we'd go around from shearing shed to shearing shed. My mother always wanted us to be educated so I went to a school. I literally do remember discovering the library at my school and, I'm not shitting you, just sneaking off to sit and read books.

Guy [Cotter, who had taken over Adventure Consultants after Rob Hall's death and also serves as Key Alpine Advisor on Everest (2015)] was one of Rob's best friends, and he'd known him and climbed with him for a long time. Finding a friendship with Guy, and finding a way to understand that New Zealand sense of humor, which is very different to Australia, really helped inform me.

Coming to America was a big thing for me. It was an all-in thing. Everything was at stake. What are you going to do if it doesn't work out? I didn't have a Plan B. I grew up with my father and saw how hard that kind of labour is.

[on climbing Ben Nevis and a New Zealand glacier with co-star Martin Henderson before shooting Everest (2015)] I wanted to do it. I wanted to get better. I wanted to know what I was doing. I needed to have a competency and a level of understanding of how I operate.

[The 40's can be a golden age] as a male actor. You've just got to look at the roll of the dice of the way roles go. Women have a much more difficult job. There's only room for one Meryl Streep. But as a man you come into fruition a little bit later. Or I certainly have, anyway.

They're all mates of mine - Guy [Pearce], Joel [Edgerton], Benny [Mendelsohn] - and amazing actors.

I'd change nothing in my career path. I was never built for being a handsome teenage star. That's just not in my psyche I think. I would have hated to have grown-up famous. I'm glad to have grown up in the countryside and played, and had to use my imagination rather than a TV and had to learn to act the hard way, to have dealt with the rejection. It's a life as well as a job, at the end the day we all have to work for a living, but we have to have a life as well.

[on being not quite sure how he ended up pursuing acting, given that it was a world very far removed from the one he grew up in] My mum and dad joke about it a lot. I have a distant memory of being sick at home sometime and watching Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)... I had no idea about movies at the time - you know when you're sick and there's a mid-day movie on sometimes? [...] I don't know, I was a dreamer... It's too late now, I can't do anything else. I'm stuck with it.

I didn't want to be some showy actor [in Everest (2015)], I just wanted to do it. Rob was a quiet, kind of just-get-on-with-it dude. These New Zealanders are not show-offs. They're not bravado. They're competent, they're quiet, they're gentle, but they're strong, and that was really important to me, to capture the spirit of Rob.

Europeans have it better than the Americans. The Americans work too hard. The balance is out of whack. Europe's hung onto a little bit more of living a life and then working as well.

So many young people these days - if something doesn't work out it isn't meant to be. But, I find it through accumulation - through hard work. You find your love and passion through getting better at something. Through exploring.

Google images for Winton, Queensland, it'll tell you everything you need to know.

If you really want to see some strange shit and take a far-out trip, go to [my hometown] Winton.

I don't think I've ever been good at posing for photographs!

If you come from nothing, or not much, you're always afraid. You've touched that. So, you think, I've got to work!

My teeth are very small and crooked, and Ted had that Kennedy smile. We spent months getting these [veneers] on right. It changed my smile. For a long time, though, I had a lisp - I couldn't dentalize my T's and D's. I drilled for months to be able to speak.

Being from Australia, I love being in nature - climbing, backpacking for weeks. I used to chase adrenaline, but after having two kids, I'm not a lunatic anymore.