Peter Sarsgaard makes sure 'Memory' goes beyond the dementia

By Lesley O’Toole

Dec. 20, 2023 3:30 AM PT

Peter Sarsgaard is “so passionate” about his film “Memory” that he’s selling it like he hasn’t “promoted anything else” in his career. This incredibly moving cinematic dance between his Saul, with early-onset dementia, and Jessica Chastain’s Sylvia, a social worker battling her own trauma, has audiences weeping, which doesn’t surprise him. “I find it so gratifying that people are emotional watching this. They have a feeling of unity and optimism.”

He has zero complaints then, this sunny lunchtime at a West Hollywood hotel, bar the limited vegetarian fare. “I guess I’m going to have this polenta I’ve had 12 times,” he says, laughing.

Sarsgaard considers his “Memory” role among his best work. “I didn’t let it just be an emotional crisis. I started out being a very emotional actor, because I’m a very emotional person. That got in the way of my acting sometimes. Some performances I’ve received awards for were more hyperbolic, but I’ve graduated.”

The Venice International Film Festival jury concurred in September, naming him best actor. Sarsgaard was the one weeping on concluding his profound acceptance speech, when he dedicated the honor to his late uncle Bubba, who had dementia, inspired this performance and died during the COVID pandemic. “Awards are nice, like ice cream, like your birthday,” he grins, across his polenta alternative of hummus and salad.

It was Chastain who recommended Sarsgaard to director Michel Franco to be her co-star in the film that will have an Oscar-qualifying run Dec. 22 and open wider Jan. 5. She had always wanted to work with him, highlighting his lack of ego and vanity and his propensity for lifting other actors. “We all have ego and vanity,” he responds, “and I think of acting as a team effort. When you engage another person, it lifts them.”

Franco was impressed too and relished Sarsgaard’s wanting to avoid making “a dementia movie,” when it is patently about healing and connection. “I really wanted to play someone early enough [in the disease] where it was a question of what he could and couldn’t do. When do you take away the car keys? Can he have a relationship? Of course he can.”

Peter Sarsgaard and Jessica Chastain sit outside on a bench in "Memory."

Despite a nearly 30-year résumé replete with acclaimed films (his first was 1995’s “Dead Man Walking”), Sarsgaard is not a movie star and he’s copacetic with that. “I have just wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I’ve been lucky enough. Movie stardom has to do with so many things. We’re in the age of the six-pack and even though I’m athletic, and I was born athletic, I’m never going to be like that. I also don’t love the way I look.”

And after all this time in the business, he is still confused within the industry with the Skarsgard family. “All the time,” he smiles, without frustration. “People say, ‘I’ll say hello to your dad for you,’ and I’m like, ‘I doubt it.’ I met Stellan [Skarsgard] maybe 30 years ago and said, ‘My name’s Peter Sarsgaard, I’m an actor, and people always ask me if you’re my father.’ My memory was that I think we were going to pretend we were related.”

Of movie stars he has worked with and learned from, Sean Penn tops the list. “With ‘Dead Man Walking,’ Sean was the first professional I saw act up close, the person I think I learned the most about acting from. It was the beginning of my career. He was really good at it, and fun. I was lucky to have a front row seat.” He’d love a front row seat next with “Jesse Plemons and Daniel Day-Lewis, if he’ll come out of retirement. He takes a big f—ing swing every time. I do choke up on the bat sometimes, so I remind myself of people like him, who have been brave.”

Ask about his best work professionally, besides “Memory,” and things get a little weird. He cites scenes, like “an awesome moment in 2005’s ‘The Dying Gaul.’ It’s probably the apotheosis of my emotional bloodletting that I ever did — I have a full-on emotional crisis on camera, while Campbell Scott is masturbating me.”

A rich off-set life, evidently keeping him well-balanced, is split between Brooklyn and Vermont with wife Maggie Gyllenhaal and their two daughters. He’s a beekeeper like his late uncle and, besides his “The Batman” role, a bat man for real, prompted by bats’ being endangered in America’s northeast. “There’s a fungus that grows on their nose, wakes them up from hibernation and they starve to death. So I started putting out bat houses to try and give them sanctuary.” About 200 now live in a “bat house” Sarsgaard built. “People come and stay in it; it’s lovely coexisting with them. To me, bats are inspirational, because they’re the only mammal that can fly. Squirrels just do some sort of bull— version of it where they jump from tree to tree and then glide.”

Sarsgaard will glide on, with or without upcoming nominations, “perfectly happy” either way. And there won’t be any alarms being set for dawn award announcements. “Nobody in my house would wake up for that.”

Healing, connection, optimism’: Peter Sarsgaard takes ‘Memory’ beyond the dementia

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