Peter Sarsgaard broke his own rule about how to play real people for 'Experimenter'

When Peter Sarsgaard is cast to play a real-life person, he usually treats the role as a fictional character. But the actor says something about preparing to play Stanley Milgram in "Experimenter" felt different.

Oct. 20, 2015 7 AM PT

Peter Sarsgaard has played more than his fair share of real people during his 20-year film career. In fact, he’s playing three in films currently in theatrical release — “Black Mass,” “Pawn Sacrifice” and “Experimenter,” which came out earlier this month in theaters and is also available on video on demand.

Ironically, the personable 44-year-old actor doesn’t like to do to biopics. So he generally pays little attention to the details of the real person, whether the ill-fated associate of mobster Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp) in “Black Mass” or an American chess grand champion in “Pawn Sacrifice,” which chronicles the 1972 World Chess Championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky.

“I just approached it entirely as a work of fiction,” said Sarsgaard during a recent conversation via phone. “What was in the script was what I knew. The rest I made up.”

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He didn’t follow that protocol in his latest film; Sarsgaard didn’t make up anything in “Experimenter,” which has received strong notices. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda (“Hamlet,” “Cymbeline”), “Experimenter” revolves around controversial social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who in 1961 conducted a psychology experiment at Yale in which people delivered what they thought were increasingly stronger electric shocks to a stranger in another room every time he got an answer wrong.

Though the stranger cried out in agony or told them to stop, Milgram discovered that over 60% of the subjects continued to administer the shocks because they were told to do so. Milgram, who was Jewish, was attempting to come to terms with the Holocaust — the experiment took place during the televised trial of Nazi SS commander Adolf Eichmann — and why the Germans complied with Nazi authority.

“Experimenter” felt “different,” said Sarsgaard, who is married to Oscar-nominated actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, with whom he has two young daughters. “We were trying to do something else than a normal biopic. A part like this, which is nice, is that I am not being asked to be a superhero. I am just a guy with faults, whatever they may be.”

Stylistically, “Experimenter,” which also stars Winona Ryder as Milgram’s wife, doesn’t resemble most biopics. Not only does Milgram break the fourth wall to talk to the audience, he also breaks out in song. And in several scenes, Almereyda uses old-fashioned back projection, which gives the film a theatrical sensibility.

“I loved that about the movie,” said Sarsgaard. “What is real and what is not real? That is part of the experiment.”

He studied Milgram’s own videos to inform how he would play his asides to the audience. Instead of saddling up to viewers and making them part of his machinations like Kevin Spacey does in “House of Cards,” Sarsgaard treats them as pupils in a classroom.

“If you watch them, he has a kind of formality that he is trying a lot of the time to break,” said Sarsgaard. “He has a glass of wine in one scene. He tries to make it seem informal, but he can’t help but be presentational.”

One of the most versatile actors working in film, TV and theater today, Sarsgaard has played such roles as Hamlet on the New York stage, the voice of Robot in the 2012 indie “Robot & Frank” and the violent, bullying villain in 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”

He noted that producers tend to cast him more in bad guy roles — and he’s comfortable with that. “There is more freedom [playing the bad guy],” he said. “Also, I am not good-looking enough to play the good guy. A lot of the times it is because of very superficial [reasons] — the quality of my voice, what I sound like, what I look like, what my eyes look like, how open they are.”

Sarsgaard’s agent recommended the actor to the filmmaker. “Once he read it we met,” noted Almereyda. “It made all kinds of sense [to cast him] because of Peter’s grasp of the material and the man was so sharp and so engaged.”

And like Milgram, said Almereyda, Sarsgaard has a “sense of charm, but also a sense of detachment. He does have a warmth and is also a family man. He connected on many levels.”

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Sarsgaard recently completed shooting the role of the bad guy in the remake of the 1960 western classic “The Magnificent Seven,” starring Denzel Washington.

“I just finished ‘Hamlet,’” Sarsgaard said. “I literally went off the stage straight into that.”

He admits he may have brought a little of Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane to his performance in that film.

“We don’t scrub the chalkboard clean each time [we finish a part],” said Sarsgaard. “I had to pontificate quite a bit in the movie. As I was doing the film, I think I may have been quite high on myself, Hamlet-like, loving my own ideas a little too much.”

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