Awards season in Los Angeles means there are countless screenings, Q&As, and cocktail parties to attend. But not all of them have a view of the Santa Monica Pier and the Pacific Ocean. On Thursday, Vanity Fair and IHG’s Regent Santa Monica Beach hosted a live Little Gold Men taping with Train Dreams star Joel Edgerton. After the conversation, guests mingled on the hotel’s terrace overlooking the beach and enjoyed a particularly beautiful Southern California night.
Following his Golden Globe nomination this week, Edgerton has been gaining steam in the best-actor race. Train Dreams, which premiered at Sundance and was quickly purchased by Netflix, has had a slow but steady rise this season, with more and more voters seeing the film and responding to it. When asked by Little Gold Men cohost Rebecca Ford which was more important to him, his Golden Globe nomination or his guest-starring role on the massively popular Australian kids show Bluey, Edgerton joked, “I should get a Golden Globe nomination for voice work in Bluey!” But seriously: “Look, I was thrilled to get nominated for a Golden Globe. For sure, it’s nice to be recognized. I won’t lie and say it doesn’t feel good.”
Edgerton spoke about how the film shows similarities between his home country and the US. “America, that was about the movement west,” he said. “In Australia, we had our own versions of that, homesteaders and pioneers and explorers. I think, to put aside any politics around colonialism, this sense of people being the first to kind of move out into a space and make a life and grow their own food—I really have a lot of respect for people who have put themselves [to] the task of the hard work of building a life outside of a city, and rural people are very much an Australian identity.” The full conversation with Edgerton will appear on the January 6 episode of Little Gold Men.
