Actor, screenwriter, director and producer, Joel Edgerton will honored by France’s Deauville American Film Festival this September.
He will be feted with its Deauville Talent Award on September 11 in a gala event followed by a special screening of his upcoming film Train Dreams, which debuted at Sundance this year and makes its international premiere at TIFF ahead of a limited theatrical run and launch on Netflix in November.
Based on Denis Johnson’s eponymous novella, the movie stars Edgerton as Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker who leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty in the rapidly changing America of the early 20th Century.
The feature’s Oscar-nominated director Clint Bentley will also be in attendance.
Edgerton follows in the wake of Deauville 2024 honorees Michelle Williams, Natalie Portman and Michael Douglas.
Born in Blacktown, Australia, he began his career on stage after training at the Nepean Drama School, making his screen debut in the mid-1990s at home, before gaining international recognition for his role as Owen Lars in Star Wars: Episode II and Episode III.
His filmography includes intense, complex roles in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Scott Cooper’s Black Mass (2015); a professor turned MMA fighter in Warrior by Gavin O’Connor (2011); a wealthy heir in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013); and Loving by Jeff Nichols (2016), a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
In 2015, he successfully stepped behind the camera with the thriller The Gift, in which he also starred in.He followed this three years later with second feature, Boy Erased, featuring Lucas Hedges, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman.
A screenwriter on all of his directorial projects, he also co-wrote The Rover (2013) and The King (2019), both directed by David Michôd.
More recently, he played the main role in Master Gardener by Paul Schrader, The Boys in the Boat by George Clooney and the Apple TV+ series Dark Matter.
As a producer, he was involved in the documentary Daughters, which won an award at the Sundance FilmFestival, the Netflix miniseries Boy Swallows Universe, and feature film The Plague by Charlie Polinger, which premiered at the last Cannes Film Festival and in which he also stars.
