Buried in the “Personal Quotes” section of Garrett Hedlund’s IMDB page, there’s this gem: “I’ve been told I’m too good-looking for certain roles, but that’s O.K., it just motivates me to go deeper.”
That’s a hilarious thing to imagine a young actor saying, and not hard to believe coming from Hedlund, whose first major role was in 2004’s Troy as Brad Pitt’s baby-faced cousin, Patroclus. Sadly, it’s also untrue.
“Maybe you can help clear it up,” Hedlund said when reminded of the quote, during a conversation about Pan, in which he stars. “You do something for Teen magazine or something because I was 18. All they care about is who would you rather be with, Jessica Simpson, the Olsen twins, or blah, blah, blah.”
The way Hedlund remembers it, he was given a leading question—“Have you ever been told you were too good-looking for a role?”—and then admitted that, being blond and blue-eyed, he wasn’t necessarily getting the darker parts he went out for. Voila, the quote was born, though he didn’t get away with it fully unscathed. “My friends busted the shit out of me,” Hedlund remembers. “I’m like, ‘Guys, it’s fucking. . .’ It wasn’t my fault.”
And he wasn’t the only member of the Hedlund family to step into it when Troy came out. “I remember one time my father was being interviewed, and they asked them about me getting Troy. He said a bunch of words and, in those words, said I looked like Brad, thus I got the role. Then you see this back and you’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ He’s like, ‘I didn’t say that.’ Now you know what we go through.”
In Pan, Hedlund isn’t exactly bad-looking—he plays a young, roguish version of Captain Hook, who befriends Peter (Levi Miller) and helps him fight against the vicious Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). The character is old-fashioned in the style of Clark Gable or Errol Flynn, and he and director Joe Wright worked together to make the character’s voice like someone “out of an old John Ford film.” But the tone of Pan is big and brash, and Hedlund’s Hook is all exaggerated growls and wide facial expressions.
That’s not exactly the kind of acting Hedlund has done before. “When I was doing my first film, a British actor said one of the lines he always lived by was, ‘Whatever you can do, I can do less of.’ I sort of would run with that.”
That first film, of course, was Troy. Hedlund confirmed that the British actor was not, in fact, his Troy co-star Peter O’Toole, but as it turns out, O’Toole had an impact on Pan anyway. On that one Peter would like throw his arm around me and be like, “Garret, my boy. Come on,” Hedlund says, bringing out a spot-on O’Toole impression. Then he drops the British accent and says, “Now Peter, we can do this,” and suddenly, there it is: Hook is an American Peter O’Toole. As a guy who was also pretty darn good-looking when he first started acting, he would probably appreciate the symmetry.
