“Australian multi-hyphenate Joel Edgerton will be honored with this year’s Actors Award at the 33rd Camerimage, the world’s leading film festival on the art of cinematography. Edgerton will attend Camerimage, which runs Nov. 15-22 in Toruń, Poland, with Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. Edgerton stars as an itinerant worker in the early 1900s Pacific Northwest in”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Edgerton will attend Camerimage, which runs Nov. 15-22 in Toruń, Poland, with Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams. Edgerton stars as an itinerant worker in the early 1900s Pacific Northwest in the adaptation of the Denis Johnson novella, which premiered at Sundance. Netflix is giving the film a short theatrical bow this week before taking it worldwide on the platform Nov. 21.
Born in Blacktown, New South Wales, Edgerton began his career on stage, performing with Shakespeare and modern roles with the Sydney Theater Company in the 1990s. He first gained national attention through Aussie TV drama The Secret Life of Uswhich earned him an AACTA Award for Best Actor. George Lucas raised Edgerton’s international profile when he cast him as Owen Lars, the stepbrother of Anakin Skywalker and future guardian of Luke Skywalker, in his Star Wars prequels.
But Edgerton’s real breakthrough came in 2010, in David Michôd’s crime drama Animal Kingdom. Edgerton played Barry “Baz” Brown, the gang’s most level-headed and empathetic member, whose death early in the film sets off the chain of violence that drives the film. The role drew international attention and positioned him among a new generation of Australian actors and filmmakers. That same year, he co-wrote The Squaredirected by his brother Nash Edgerton, establishing a parallel career as a screenwriter and producer.
In Hollywood, Edgerton became known for complex, understated performances. He starred, alongside Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte, as schoolteacher-turned-MMA fighter Brendan Conlon in Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior (2011) and appeared as a US military operative in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012). In Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013), he portrayed Tom Buchanan, the wealthy and arrogant husband of Daisy Buchanan, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.
Further roles included the Hebrew leader Ramses opposite Christian Bale in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) and a conflicted FBI agent in Scott Cooper’s Black Mass (2015). His portrayal of Richard Loving in Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016) — the real-life Virginian whose marriage to Mildred Loving (played in the film by Ruth Negga) — led to a landmark US Supreme Court case — earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
Edgerton made his directorial debut with The Gift (2015), a psychological thriller he also wrote and starred in, which earned a Directors Guild of America nomination for outstanding first feature. He followed with Boy Erased (2018), based on Garrard Conley’s memoir, which received multiple nominations including at Camerimage. In Michôd’s The King (2019), he co-wrote the screenplay and played Sir John Falstaff, the dissolute mentor and confidant to Timothée Chalamet’s Henry V.
Recent work includes Thomas M. Wright The Stranger (2022), Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener (2022) and Charlie Polinger’s The Plague (2025). Edgerton continues to balance acting, writing and directing, maintaining an active presence in both Australian and international cinema.