By James Mottram
“It was towards the end of the Midnight Special shoot,” Joel Edgerton explains of how director, Jeff Nichols, cast him in his upcoming drama, Loving. “He’d had too many beers one night, and then he let me know about the film. Oh, I probably shouldn’t have told you about this yet,” the actor laughs. “But yeah, it was towards the end of that experience.”
It was while watching Joel Edgerton play a taciturn, hard-jawed Texas outlaw in his sci-fi drama, Midnight Special, that Jeff Nichols – the acclaimed director of the indies Mud, Take Shelter, and Shotgun Stories – thought the actor would be right for the role of Richard Loving in his next film, Loving. Already being talked about as a possible Oscar contender, this based-on-a-true-story drama follows Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple sentenced to prison in Virginia in 1958 just for getting married. “We’d been working on Midnight Special together, and I saw Joel’s handling of his Texas accent,” Jeff Nichols says. “I just kind of closed one eye, and I thought, ‘Oh, If I just give him some male pattern baldness, and bad teeth, he’s getting pretty close to Richard Loving.’ That was really important for me, because when I wrote the script, I was imagining the actual people, so it’s very hard to go very far away from those people physically. That’s what I had in my mind!”
Nichols’ familiarity with the physicality and speech patterns of Richard and Mildred Loving further necessitated getting it right on screen. “I was listening to these people in the documentary [2011’s HBO film, The Loving Story], and it was very important to me that these people sound like Richard and Mildred,” Nichols explains. “When we were working with Joel on his Texas accent, in Midnight Special, I really appreciated the mechanics necessary for him to build that accent. I felt that if I was able to give him all of these examples of the dialogue, and the dialect from this documentary footage, that he’d be able to recreate it, and I think that’s true! If you listen to Richard’s voice in the documentary, you’ll hear it in Joel’s voice, as opposed to an American actor, who maybe comes with an idea of a Southern accent intact. I wanted him to go through the mechanics, plus it’s a period thing. And the Virginia accent is very specific! It’s a strange accent!”
The gamble appears to have paid off, with Edgerton (currently enjoying a huge career upswing in the US after the box office success of his feature directorial debut, The Gift) garlanded with praise for his performance. And it’s a role that has really struck a chord with the actor. “I’d like to know who sits in an office somewhere and thinks of these laws,” Edgerton replies when asked why he thinks people can feel so threatened by two individuals – who mean them no harm – merely living together and loving each other. “When you think about the path of least resistance, to think about the imposition of the creation of those laws, or the upholding of those laws, it takes so much energy! And it creates so much pain and anguish! You wonder why you would stand by those laws, if you had any shred of human decency! I think that’s a fantastic question, and I usually think that I have an answer to everything, but you’ve just checkmated me!”
Loving will be released later this year. Midnight Special is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital from August 24.
