january3–16, 2022 | newyork 11he does, it’s like he’s killing himself. It’s
almost comedic. Such a clever book.”
When Sarsgaard talks about books—
which he does often over the course of our
lunch—he speaks with genuine awe. These
are apt digressions given Sarsgaard’s new-
est role as Professor Hardy, a hotshot aca-
demic, in his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fea-
ture directorial debut, The Lost Daughter.
The movie, adapted from a novel by Elena
Ferrante, centers on Leda, a divorced
middle-aged professor vacationing alone
on a Greek island who meets a younger
mother named Nina. Nina and her daugh-
ter trigger Leda’s memories of her own
early motherhood, and those sequences
run parallel to the story unfolding in the
present day: The younger Leda is a bril-
liant, ambitious scholar suffocating under
domesticity’s demands until she meets
the renowned Professor Hardy at a con-
ference. In a film about the unspeakable
aspects of motherhood, Sarsgaard’s role
is small but pivotal: By seducing Leda, he
catalyzes her to act upon her most selfish
and least maternal desires.
As an actor, Sarsgaard is a chameleon:
His breakout role was as a murderer in
Boys Don’t Cry, and he has played every-
thing from a stoner gravedigger in cult
classic Garden State to an eccentric sci-
entist in Green Lantern. To prepare for
the role of Professor Hardy, Sarsgaard
read close to 800 pages a day, he esti-
mates, in an attempt to get in touch with
his academic side. On Spetses, the austere
Greek island where The Lost Daughter
was filmed, he read The Magus, a 700-
page tome by John Fowles; and Anna
Karenina; and almost all of Nabokov’s
work. He listened to the lectures of “iconic
rock-star intellectuals” like Nabokov and
Jorge Luis Borges and Kurt Vonnegut,
studying the way they spoke to their audi-
ences about literature.
In The Lost Daughter, the seed of the
attraction between Hardy and Leda is
planted during a lecture he gives on W. H.
Auden. Sarsgaard’s character addresses
the packed room, projecting electric-
ity and gentle charisma. But the effect,
Sarsgaard admits, can be only partially
attributed to his preparation. “You have
your wife adoring you and filming you a
certain way,” he says. “If the person mak-
ing it in the camera adores you, then the
audience will adore you.”
Sarsgaard met Gyllenhaal at a dinner
about 20 years ago. Their first encounter
was not unlike that between Leda and
Professor Hardy: “We just hit it off,” Sars-
gaard says. “Not just artistically but in
terms of our minds.” The two havebeen
partners creatively as well as romantically
ever since. When, during the pandemic,
Gyllenhaal directed her first short film,
Sarsgaard starred in it (the role involved
making love to a tree). And as she wrote
the script for The Lost Daughter, he acted
as a sounding board, avoiding reading the
novel so he could come to it fresh. His role
as Professor Hardy meant Gyllenhaal had
to again direct him in sex scenes, and when
I wonder if that was weird at all, he matter-
of-factly explains it was quite the opposite.
“She was really focused on the action of the
scene—making it look a certain way,” Sars-
gaard says. “I felt less nervous than I nor-
mally would. I’ve joked, ‘Everyone should
do this with their wives.’”
He has a fascination with husband-wife
literary pairs. One of the reasons Sarsgaard
is so drawn to Nabokov is that he worked
closely with his wife, Véra, on all of his
books, including Lolita. “I was interested
in him as this guy who’d written this dirty
book with his wife. She even encouraged
him to write it,” he says, referencing the
moment Vladimir tried to burn the manu-
script and Véra saved it. Another literary
wife guy Sarsgaard cites is Norman Rush,
whose wife, Elsa, served as both an editor
and a muse for the novel Mating, about an
anthropologist who stumbles upon an all-
female society founded by a charismatic
man. “Elsa is all over that book,” he says.
“His name should be on the cover as the
guy who wrote it, but you can feel that the
book wouldn’t have been what it is without
her.” The same, he says, is true of him and
Gyllenhaal: “We are so entwined in every-
thing the other person does. We know
what scene the other person is shooting on
a given day, even if they’re far away.”
This line of literary couples is inter-
esting to consider in the context of The
Lost Daughter, which is so much about
how the conditions of womanhood stamp
out the possibilities of creative produc-
tion, how Leda’s talents and desires are
subsumed into the act of being a wife andmother. Véra Nabokov and Elsa Rush
fall into a tradition of wives who func-
tioned as their husband’s typists, readers,
muses, or silent partners but who, unlike
their spouses, have not become liter-
ary household names. But perhaps the
Sarsgaard-Gyllenhaal partnership is a
pleasing inverse: the husband who will
allow himself to be molded in service of
his wife’s vision and then stand back and
let her do her thing. “We always know that
‘this is mine and that is yours,’ ” Sarsgaard
clarifies. “I don’t have any ownership over
The Lost Daughter other than my little
part.” In the film, characters like Leda
make mysterious decisions that are never
explained or rationalized; many of Sars-
gaard’s suggestions were about adding
plot points to further the narrative propul-
sion and make the characters’ motivations
clearer—which Gyllenhaal refused. “I kept
wanting her to turn the screw tighter for
the plot,” Sarsgaard says. “This might be a
masculine thing.”
Sarsgaard freely admits that between
him and Gyllenhaal, she is the more pro-
lific one. For years, Gyllenhaal had wanted
to adapt The Days of Abandonment,
another early Ferrante novel. The book’s
rights were caught up in legal issues, but
when she was offered The Lost Daughter,
“she started working on it and wrote it
so quickly,” Sarsgaard says. He also con-
siders himself a writer, but his process is
much more laborious; he’ll start things
and abandon them halfway through, or
he’ll spend an afternoon stuck on a word.
“I was writing something at that time,
and I remember thinking, Oh my God,
I’ve written an eighth of what I wanted to
write.” He still hasn’t finished it.
These days, Sarsgaard pours as much
obsessiveness into his hobbies as he does
into his roles. Those hobbies are basically
as Early 2000s Brooklyn Dad as one can
get. (He and Gyllenhaal have two children,
ages 9 and 15.) He keeps bees, both on the
roof of the family’s Brooklyn apartment
and at their Vermont home, where he has
a small orchard. He grows apples, pears,
cherries, apricots, and plums as well as
lingonberries, cranberries, blueberries,
raspberries, and strawberries. “I go very
deep with this stuff,” he says, before laun-
ching into an explanation of the difference
between mason bees and honeybees.
Soon, Sarsgaard is gathering his tote
and fetching his dog, a wirehaired pointer
that has been waiting patiently outside
the restaurant. He plans to spend the
afternoon digging into a new project. “I’m
writing something for Maggie to act in and
another project for us to do together,” he
says. “She’s helping me with it.” ■“We alwaysknow that ‘thisis mineandth at is yours.’ ”