Hollywood star full of praise for Wicklow and his ‘phenomenal’ Irish co-star

Stephen Porzio

‘The Wicklow Way is maybe my favourite path that I’ve ever run on.’

Hollywood star Peter Sarsgaard has been on a roll for the past few years.

Not only did he appear in the most recent Batman movie and win a Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival for the drama Memory but he also recently earned rave reviews for his scene-stealing turn in Apple TV+ hit legal thriller show Presumed Innocent.

His acclaimed run continues with the Oscar-nominated, currently in cinemas September 5, which chronicles the terrorist attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.

Unlike other movies about the topic, however, the film is told entirely from the perspective of the ABC Sports broadcasting crew (led by Sarsgaard) who thought they were going to be covering the Olympics but ended up providing live coverage to the world of the ongoing hostage situation.

JOE interviewed Sarsgaard and his September 5 co-star Ben Chaplin about the brilliantly tense journalism thriller and during the conversation, we asked the former about working with the Irish actress Jessie Buckley.

The pair appeared together in the movie The Lost Daughter, which was written and directed by Sarsgaard’s wife Maggie Gyllenhaal and earned Buckley a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars.

Buckley and Sarsgaard will also reunite on Gyllenhaal’s next directorial effort The Bride!, a new film remake of Bride of Frankenstein.

When we brought up the topic of Ireland, Sarsgaard mentioned how he spent time in Wicklow as his wife filmed the 2014 Irish comedy musical Frank, in which she starred opposite Domhnall Gleeson and Michael Fassbender.

And he was full of praise for the county, telling JOE: “Well, The Wicklow Way is maybe my favourite path that I’ve ever run on.”

He added, laughing: “I kept thinking that I would run across Daniel Day-Lewis but it never happened. I actually thought maybe he would be running the other way and we could just high-five as we went by – silent, we wouldn’t say anything.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley on the set of The Bride!

Discussing The Bride! and working with Buckley, Sarsgaard added:

“Jessie in The Bride! is just absolutely fantastic. I mean, she’s virtuosic in the movie, you’ll see.

“It’s like another level of acting that I can’t really imagine doing. She’s juggling so many things in the movie, it’s just phenomenal. It’s so physical.

“We all know that Jessie can sing and act and it turns out she can also really dance and she dances in this movie.”