Just because two actors want to work together doesn’t mean it’s ever going to happen. Joel Edgerton knows this. Felicity Jones does, too.
So when the Australian actor heard that he and Jones were both circling Train Dreams, he knew he had to seal the deal. “We happened to run in to each other a couple of times when Felicity had started to talk to [the director] about it,” he recalls. “She was drawn to the film for her own reasons, but I was very much like, ‘Can you, like, please, please please?!”
She said yes. And more than a year later, Edgerton (The Gift, The Great Gatsby) and Jones (a 2025 Oscar nominee for The Brutalist) are sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a posh London hotel room for their Parade interview to discuss their widely acclaimed new movie.
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Set in the Pacific Northwest during the early part of the 20th century, Train Dreams (now streaming on Netflix) is a reflective and gorgeous character study that focuses on stoicism in an ever-changing world. Edgerton’s Robert is a logger and railroad worker who finds comfort in his marriage to Gladys (Jones), the couple’s modest rural home and their young daughter. But work constantly pulls him away . . . and then a tragedy upends his world. The drama, which world-premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, currently sits at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
“It dares to strive to do something a bit different than the typical cinema experience,” Edgerton says. “It’s a celebration of an ordinary life.”
It’s not quite accurate to describe the actors’ offscreen lives the same way. Edgerton, 51, who broke out in the 2010 drama Animal Kingdom, has 4-year-old twins with his partner, Vogue Australia editor Christine Centenera; the 42-year-old Jones, a native Brit, has two small children with her husband, film director Charles Guard. FYI, they’re also part of the Star Wars universe — she starred in 2017’s Rogue One, while he played Luke Skywalker’s uncle Owen in two movie prequels and the 2022 series, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Related: Star Wars Just Took Its Universe Somewhere It’s Never Gone Before
The pair talk about Train Dreams and more to Parade.
Parade: How do you describe this movie to people?
Felicity Jones: If you go through the film, it functions on two levels: Someone dies very early on in the film, and from that point on, you're completely drawn in. You can't stop watching it because of the violence, and sometimes it's quite unexpected. So yes, it is meditative and reflective. But at the same time, there's something actually more aggressive going on underneath.
Joel Edgerton: I think the violence is on the fringes everywhere. I’ve heard the film described as a neo-Western, which is great.
What do you make of life in the early 1900s? Do you think it was a better time back then?
Edgerton: I do. If we suddenly woke up tomorrow and all of our smartphones and devices were just gone — like a Black Mirror episode where everyone wakes up and every single person on the planet’s cell phone had just vanished and we had to go back to an analog way of life — I think we would adjust very well. We'd be all the better for it.
Jones: We’d be happy again.
Edgerton: We'd be happy, and we would talk to each other and connect with each other, and we'd be with the people that we’re actually with instead of texting someone on the other side of the planet.
Jones: But certain elements are better now. The advances in medicine are quite useful. You kind of want to pick and choose what you'd take with you.
Edgerton: I’d pick my Nanny Cam.
Joel, you realize you’re just describing life in the ‘90s, right?
Edgerton: Listen, I didn't have an email address until the year after I finished high school. I consider myself a person of moderate intelligence. But I wonder how distracted and therefore uneducated I could have become if I didn’t have access to the Internet. I'm not talking about frivolous things — like the discovery of stuff you love that you would have to go to a library for or meet someone extraordinary or weird or strange. I don't know if the Internet would basically have made me a better or worse student or a better or a worse person.
It's easy to deduce that your characters have a special relationship because there are no other distractions.
Edgerton: Yeah, we get to go hunting together. Felicity, do you want to go hunting?
Jones: I’d love to. Yeah, we’re tapping into that quieter lifestyle — you can still find it when you're in rural areas with a different pace. There is a slowness. But then they have different problems, and those problems are more, you know, about nature and what's around them, and potentially animals. And so they're having to adapt and survive.
Edgerton: I feel like Covid became my cabin in the woods with my relationship. Yes, there was still the distraction of the Internet, and we could watch television and use our phones. But we hunkered down together. I can happily say that my relationship got better, and I realized not just that I love my partner, but I really liked her as well.
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You’re both parents as well. Do you bring that real-life role with you when you film a movie like this?
Edgerton: In terms of structure, it helped the movie. I started pre-production, and the first two weeks of the shoot I was on my own. So one of the reasons I connected with the character was because of that question of going away for work. I was alone. Then my family came to be with me in the middle of the shoot, and I was alone for the last part of it.
Jones: Our children are similar ages to the child in the film, so you can't help but draw on your own life.
After being part of epic productions like those Star Wars films, is it nice to be in a movie that’s more rooted in reality? Or do you prefer the best of both worlds?
Edgerton: I mean, every film is its own machine. And films like this feel more bespoke. There's a greater cadence to the momentum of shooting. This was a five-scenes-a-day kind of movie. On the bigger ones, they're going to be lighting for three hours, so I better bring a good book to read. You work out how you fit into the machine. There's something about a fast moving, smaller machine that suits me. It reminds me of the first movies I made in Australia. We were just like, “Come on, guys, there's a bear chasing us down the street!”
Jones: Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter so much about big and small. It totally comes down to the atmosphere on set. And that atmosphere is usually set by the director.
Edgerton: That's a really good point, actually. If you could work on a big scale thing with the director and still care about the interpersonal relationships, then it doesn't feel like you have been swallowed.
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Now that you’ve spent so much time together, what have you learned about each other?
Edgerton: I love that there's a mystery to every actor. With Felicity, we had a really great time not overthinking it in a scene. I liked listening to her as we had conversations around the building of a fabric of this relationship and then just letting it play out.
Jones: You don't want to be having big, long conversations about what you're doing! I’ve also learned that Joel is a laugh a minute.
You know Joel, it’s still pretty jarring to hear that thick Australian accent.
Edgerton: The beauty of being an actor is that transformational aspect. I didn’t want to just play, you know, middle-class Australian dudes.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity
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