Matthias Schoenaerts is a Woman's Rock in the Romantic Epic “Far From the Madding Crowd”
For actor
Matthias Schoenaerts, playing the steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak in the
big-screen adaptation of “Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy was a
profound experience. The 37-year-old Belgian says that the character helped him
shape his personal life.
Truly relatable even in 2015,
the exuberant story of Victorian farmer Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan)
starts out a simple country girl who has inherited her uncle’s farm, and
becomes a fierce-willed, impulsive heiress who is faced with a myriad of life
choices. She’s surrounded, and confounded,
by intriguing suitors, one of them is the down to earth farmer Gabriel Oak
(Schoenaerts).
“Oak represents values that I
really value and admire in people,” begins Schoenaerts, who made his
international breakthrough with the 2012 drama “Rust and Bone.” “Even though he
suffers a lot of set backs and gets emotional beatings, he always stays on the
path of truthfulness and righteousness. That is pretty rare.”
Though Bathsheba Everdeen values
her independence more than almost anything, her life is complicated by three
very determined suitors who each seek her hand in marriage. Her first proposal comes from the upstanding
landowner Gabriel Oak, but she is too independent to consider it at the time. “Oak is a difficult dramatic character,”
notes director Thomas Vinterberg. “Here
is this guy who decides on this woman, yet he’s just sort of there for her,
hanging out on the farm waiting for her to choose him, so he’s not really the
prototype of an active male lead. So
what I was looking for in an actor was the essence of Gabriel’s innate strength
and pride.”
He found that quality in the
rising Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, who first riveted global audiences
as a steroid-pumping cattle farmer in “Bullhead,” and then starred opposite
Marion Cotillard in Jacques Audiard’s gritty romance “Rust and Bone,” for which
he won the Cesar Award for Most Promising Actor. He also played Eric Deeds in Michaël Roskam’s
“The Drop” with Tom Hardy and the late James Gandolfini.
“Matthias is a man’s man and you
can feel there is so much integrity in him,” says Vinterberg of Schoenaerts.
“He’s a brilliant actor, he's very sexy, and he's amazing to work with. As Oak, he is that rock in Bathsheba’s world,
but then again, he also has a real vulnerability in his eyes.”
Schoenaerts was keen to work
with Vinterberg, and loved the director’s reasons for revisiting Hardy in our
times. Says the actor: “I was curious as
to why Thomas was so eager to make this film now,” he admits. “He had a very simple and very reasonable
answer. He said ‘I think we need this
kind of story right now because we live in very cynical times and we need a
story that is about something else, and this is a beautiful one.’ His passion just radiated through his
voice.”
The rough hewn physicality of
Schoenaerts’ performance certainly seduced Carey Mulligan. “Matthias is such a brilliant actor that he
had the essence of Oak the moment he came on set,” she says. “There is something astonishing about
Matthias because he is so huge and domineering yet also very gentle. He had that sturdiness and reliability you
want in Oak – and yet you feel he looks at you and sees straight through
you.”
“Far From the Madding Crowd”
opens this July 8 in cinemas from 20th Century Fox to be distributed
by Warner Bros.
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