Jason Clarke on stardom and his role in mountaineering drama Everest
The Australian actor talks about the difficulties of his role in mountaineering drama Everest and the long road to stardom
“DIRECTORS CAST ME because they want me,” Jason Clarke said. “I’m not a big movie star.”
That’s partly his own fault, of course: The Australian actor tends to disappear into his roles and has little interest in walking red carpets or polishing his social-media presence.
“I like to stay mysterious,” he said.
Despite his low profile, though, those directors keep casting him. Kathryn Bigelow tapped Clarke to play a ruthless CIA intelligence officer in Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the film that finally put him in Hollywood’s sight line. Baz Luhrmann chose him to play the cuckolded garage owner in The Great Gatsby (2013). In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), his character was on the side of the apes. In this summer’s Terminator Genisys, he took on the iconic role of John Connor.
Now Clarke is stirring emotions as Rob Hall, the mountain climber/guide/expectant father who got caught in a brutal blizzard while scaling Mount Everest in 1996, in Everest, scheduled to open today in the UAE.
Eight people died that day on the world’s highest mountain, and the story captured worldwide attention. At the time Clarke was living in Australia and struggling to establish his career.
“I’ve always been haunted by this man who was on the top of the world and couldn’t get home,” the 46-year-old actor said. “The more you dug into it, the richer and more complicated it became. It’s like a detective story.”
EMOTIONAL CONNECTION
Clarke was conversing in a hotel suite on a warm day in West Hollywood. Outside it was about 140 degrees hotter than Clarke and his fellow actors — including Josh Brolin,
Jake Gyllenhaal, John Hawkes and Martin Henderson — faced during filming.
The air conditioning was on high, but the actor was not sitting back and relaxing. Instead he seemed on a mission to make sure that Hall’s story got the respect he felt it was due.
“I needed to put this character inside me,” Clarke explained. “I wanted to bring reality to a man on a mountain saying goodbye to his wife and the child he would never get a chance to meet. I had a real emotional connection to the story.”
At the time Clarke himself was contemplating becoming a father, and now he has a young son.
“My little man is 7 months old,” he said with considerable excitement. “That’s changed a few things. If I’m asked to be away from home, I need to know, ‘Can the family come?’ I need that emotional support. I want them around me.”
Clarke lives in Los Angeles with his partner, French actress Cécile Breccia.
“When you’re younger, you take calculated risks,” he said. “You’ve got to push yourself out of your comfort zone. It’s the same with love and intimacy. If you don’t use certain muscles, they won’t stay in shape.
“I started racing cars a couple years ago,” the actor continued, “and I love sports. In America I began hiking and climbing. But would I do crazy stuff? No.” Some might put making Everest into the “crazy stuff” category. The mountain’s summit is 29,029 feet, more than five miles above sea level. Thousands of climbers have tried to get to the top since Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay first achieved that goal in 1953, and many have perished en route.
Although the actors did not try to summit, they did spend six weeks filming on the lower part of the mountain. They then completed production in the Italian Alps, at Cinecitta Studios in Rome and at Pinewood Studios outside London.
EXTENSIVE TRAINING
Playing a world-class mountaineer and guide required Clarke to prepare extensively. To learn more about Hall, he spent four days in New Zealand with Hall’s widow, Jan, who is played in the movie by Keira Knightley.
“I felt the weight of responsibility to not be frivolous,” Clarke said. “People died on Rob’s watch. These people had children. You don’t pick up somebody’s life just ... because. It’s not the right thing to do.”
When he arrived, he discovered that it was Jan’s birthday.
“She invited me along to her party,” Clarke said. “The family gave me little bits to help me, after holding onto it for 20 years.
“One of Rob’s brothers is a detective,” he added. “He asked me, ‘Why are you making this film? Why are you playing my brother?’ Later he said, ‘I felt like I spent two hours with Rob.’”
Director Baltasar Kormákur pushed the cast to face the elements and deal with their fears. At one point he said, “A happy actor is not a good actor” — and he wasn’t joking.
Clarke, who insists that he enjoys the rehearsal process on a film more than anything else, was eager to test his climbing skills.
“Balt wanted us to be as real as possible,” he said. “He knew I would be authentic.”
“We got very lucky during rehearsals over Christmas, in London, when there was a massive storm on Ben Nevis,” Clarke added, referring to the highest mountain in the United Kingdom. “One of the great things was that Universal wrote me a check and gave me helicopters and a guide. Martin Henderson and I got on a plane and did ice climbing. It was nice to be rappelling off the North face with a guide who knew what he was doing to help us out.
“Then, in January, Marty and I went to the Tasman Glacier (in New Zealand), which was Rob’s old stomping grounds,” he continued. “We did a lot of rappelling down crevasses and experiencing whiteouts, touching 120-mile-per-hour winds for 15 minutes and just taking it.”
DANGEROUS TERRAIN
Clarke sounded exhilarated, yet also relieved that filming is over.
“It was dangerous,” he said. “A couple of times I’ve been on mountains and have made mistakes. It took a bit of luck for me to be OK.”
He has no plans to return to Everest.
“I’d love to stand on top of the world,” he said. “I’ve flown past it a couple times, and I have gone to 23,000 feet. But I wouldn’t like the crowds, and I don’t have the three months it would take to prepare.”
That’s for sure. Clarke recently completed All I See Is You, a psychological thriller in which Blake Lively plays a blind woman who regains her sight and learns disturbing things about her relationship with her husband. Clarke described it as “a freewheeling love story.”
Currently he has bleached his hair blond for HHHH, in which he plays Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking German Nazi who was assassinated in 1942. The film, with co-stars Rosamund Pike and Mia Wasikowska, is scheduled for release next year.
“It’s important to understand Heydrich and those times,” Clarke said. “He is a dense, complicated character. I’m learning fencing and the violin, as well as posture and the Nazi salute.
“I wanted the challenge,” he added. “It takes me back to my drama-school days.”
While growing up, Clarke had no thought of becoming an actor. He and his family lived in central Queensland, where his father sheared sheep. He went off to college to become a lawyer, but discovered performing through his best friend, who was in drama school. Intrigued, Clarke transferred to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.
Success did not come quickly.
“I’ve been frustrated, and there were times I considered giving up,” he admitted. “Then Philip Noyce cast me in
Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).” Clarke played a villainous police constable in the period film, about the government taking mixed-blood Aboriginal children away from their parents. It received strong critical acclaim, and Noyce encouraged him to move to the United States and take a shot at Hollywood.
It took several years of knocking on doors, but eventually Clarke won a leading role as a Rhode Island politician on the Showtime series Brotherhood (2006-2008). He went on to play a detective trying to clean up corruption on Fox’s The Chicago Code (2011). Zero Dark Thirty put him on the big screen to stay.
The actor is not surprised that major success has taken him so long to arrive. “The one time I had my fortune told,” Clarke recalled, “the woman said, ‘You’ll be a late bloomer.’”