GARRETT HEDLUND: ROAD SCHOLAR
At 17, the actor began an epic, meandering journey reminiscent of jack kerouac's. Tired of moving from one failed audition to the next, the kid from wannaska, minnesota (pop. 488), holed up in bookshops, dog-earing copies of bukowski, huxley, and . . . Kerouac, and began writing his own free-flowing prose and poetry. Eleven years and thousands of handwritten pages later, he's the breakout star of on the road. And the beat goes on.
BY JONATHAN MILES
It's barely 1 p.m. down on New York's MacDougal Street, and Garrett Hedlund is checking out the ladies. We're in the back room of Minetta Tavern—once a grimy, neon-spangled haunt for Greenwich Village bohemians, now a buffed Keith McNally restaurant with a $26 burger anchoring the lunch menu—where, at present, the waiter is blocking Hedlund's view. Hedlund, dressed in a charcoal shawl-collar sweater and gray jeans, cranes his neck for a better angle. "Yep, they're already drinking," he says, sounding pleased, and the waiter and I follow Hedlund's gaze to four older women wearing hats who sit sipping white wine. These blue-haired ladies are all the affirmation Hedlund requires. "Grey Goose and water," he tells the waiter.
Drink orders don't usually carry metaphorical freight, but something of Hedlund's persona is suffused in this one: the id-driven wild man jonesing for a boundaryless blast of pleasure (or at least a midday vodka)—the same wild man Hedlund unleashed in his movie-stealing performance as Dean Moriarty in the film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road—tempered by the polite midwestern farm boy at Hedlund's core, by the Lutheran propriety that's an essential part of his makeup. If a clutch of septuagenarians have already uncorked the day, then where's the foul?
The 28-year-old Hedlund spent four years immersing himself in the character of Moriarty—who was based on the real-life Beat-and-hippie chieftain Neal Cassady—a spectacularly juicy role that Kerouac himself envisioned being played by Marlon Brando in his prime and that over the decades has been attached to a slew of marquee names (Dennis Hopper, Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell). But with the movie finally hitting screens nationwide, Hedlund worries what his conservative Minnesota dad's going to think when he sees him giving it to Steve Buscemi from behind. To be sure, Hedlund aims for lyrical good times, poetic bliss, transcendental grit—"To say that Garrett is a free spirit," says Walter Salles, who directed On the Road, "would be an understatement"—but he also aims to please. As Sam Riley, Hedlund's costar in the film, says about him, "He's a well-brought-up lad, isn't he?" Or maybe he's just that rare creature: a hedonist with manners and a conscience.
And on this day, Garrett Hedlund is something rarer still: a young actor, as yet unrecognizable to the wine-sipping women at Table 34, poised to break into Hollywood's top ranks. "It's funny," he says, trying to put his hinge moment into perspective. "The school I went to was a little farm school in Wannaska, student body 61 or something." This was in northern Minnesota, about 25 miles from the Canadian border, where Hedlund lived with his father, a wrestling coach and farmer, after his parents divorced when he was a toddler. "There was a kid, the only black kid in our county, Dustin Byfuglien. He won the Stanley Cup a couple years back with the Blackhawks. Out of a class of 21 kids, he and I always had to be on opposite teams on everything because we were the most athletic. We could never be on the same ****ing team. But it's just . . . funny. Two kids from an elementary school in Wannaska, Minnesota. Now he's won the Stanley Cup and I'm in New York getting interviewed for On the Road."
Winning the Stanley Cup requires fierce determination, of course, but a measure of luck as well: a skate accidentally bouncing the puck into the goal here, a blind whack whizzing improbably past the goalie there. It's the same in the acting game, and Hedlund has benefited from both. One stroke of good fortune was hereditary: With his blond hair and limpid, Robert Redford–blue eyes, Hedlund's got leading-man looks to spare. Yet he's not generically handsome. His face, like his personality, has undertones: a rubbery exuberance when he laughs, a hunched, almost awkwardly earnest and entirely unself-conscious intensity when he's waxing serious. "There's a vulnerability and sweetness that doesn't cross the border into there not being a masculinity about him," says Tim McGraw, whose roles alongside Hedlund in Friday Night Lights and Country Strong led to a friendship. "You can't help but fall in love with the guy."
Also in the luck department, one has to note the first acting role Hedlund snagged, at 18, after driving to Los Angeles in a beat-up Chevy S-10 pickup with purple lightning bolts on its doors and a giant case of ramen noodles in the back: opposite Brad Pitt and Peter O'Toole in the 2004 swords-and-sandals epic Troy. If it wasn't quite like Lana Turner being discovered while drinking a Coke at a Hollywood soda fountain, it wasn't all that far off, either.
Except for the fact that Hedlund, unlike Turner, had been begging to be discovered for most of his adolescence. After leaving Minnesota at 14 to live with his mother in Scottsdale, Arizona, Hedlund set his sights on an acting career. At the time, he wasn't sure what that meant—"I would call talent agencies to ask what kinds of food actors ate," he recalls. By 16, he finally persuaded a manager to sign him, and he was flying back and forth to L.A., solo, for auditions, funding his airfare by working as a busboy. "All my tips went to Southwest Airlines," he says. Twenty-five flights, twenty-five auditions—and zero roles. "After my first audition," he says, "the casting director told my manager I sucked pond water."
And then, at some point—maybe the 12th futile audition, maybe the 23rd—Hedlund came to a realization. "I looked around the room, and everyone, including me, looked alike," he says. He knew he had to differentiate himself from the herd of aspiring actors with teen-idol looks. But how?
"You know the Ear Inn?" Hedlund asks. "No? It's a great bar. Let's head over." We're through with lunch, with enough booze pulsing through our veins to make the teeming, sunlit city feel that much teemier and sunnier. En route, Hedlund makes a stop at Village Music World on Bleecker Street. It's a narrow little cockpit-size old-time record store, ferociously curated by its owner, Jamal Alnasr. "I love this guy," Hedlund says, finishing a cigarette before heading in. "He won't sell you an album if he doesn't think you're worthy of it." Emerging from the store for his own smoke, Alnasr greets Hedlund like an old pal, the actor filling him in onLullaby, the film that he just finished shooting in New York. Hedlund plays the son of a cancer-stricken man about to take himself off life support. "Twenty-three days of shooting on Roosevelt Island, in the hospital there," he explains. Once inside the store, Alnasr fetches Hedlund a vinyl album that he's been seeking, Townes Van Zandt's Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas, which Hedlund holds reverently. We engage in some alt-country name-checking until Hedlund checks me with an unfamiliar name: Blaze Foley, a Texas singer-songwriter who, Hedlund tells me, wrote some killer songs before he was shot in the chest in 1989.
When he fishes out his iPhone to play me his favorite Foley song, "Clay Pigeons," he discovers that its battery ran out, probably hours ago. This is as good a time as any to note how resolutely analog Garrett Hedlund is. The dead smartphone doesn't bother him a bit. He prefers his music on vinyl. He wears a wind-up wristwatch. He doesn't tweet. His e-mail address ends with "aol.com." His voluminous journals are written in longhand. By these measures, he seems laughably miscast as the lead in 2010's Tron: Legacy.
Then again, Dean Moriarty wasn't a natural fit for Hedlund, either. He's closer in spirit to Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac's alter ego in On the Road, played by Sam Riley—more contemplative, ambiguous, a fraction more disciplined, burning with a slightly cooler flame. Moriarty is all appetite, fervent and insatiable, a manic dervish of desire: for sexual stimulation (with women and with men; in the film he pinballs from Kristen Stewart to Steve Buscemi), for intellectual stimulation (jazz, poetry, the talismanic volume of Proust he totes around), and for chemical stimulation (Benzedrine, by the lots). Playing a role like that is a risk; it would be dangerously easy to push the character straight over the top, to overinflate all that hopped-up zeal. But the risk was exponentially compounded here: On the Road is more than a classic, it's a sacred text, a generational touchstone, the Kabbalah of the open road, with Moriarty as its prophet. When, prior to shooting, Hedlund ran into Colin Farrell, who'd been considered for the role in a previous studio incarnation, Farrell said to him (and Hedlund conveys this in a wildly perfect vocal impersonation), "Man, it's so ****ing brave. Doing that part takes a lot of ****ing bravery, man. Like Jesus Christ." Relating this encounter, Hedlund re-creates his own intimidated gulp. "I'm like, 'That's great. He seems braver than ****, and he's telling me I'm brave for doing this part.'"
Yet Hedlund didn't come to the role cold. His history with On the Road dated back to that realization he'd had, as a 17-year-old in an audition waiting room with a bunch of identical 17-year-old actors, that he needed something more. "I decided to try to be smarter than everyone else," he says. Reading was far from his strong suit back then. "Sports or girls," he says, was more like it. Thus began the self-education of Garrett Hedlund. "After school," he recalls, "I'd hang out at the Borders bookstore until it closed." Hedlund used it like a library reading room, dog-earing the pages of whatever book he was absorbed in before sticking it back on the shelf until the following day. "That was safe," he explains. "No one was going to buy three copies of Bukowski's Tales of Ordinary Madness by the next afternoon." His literary tastes leaned toward the raw and rebellious. Besides Bukowski, there was Brave New World, 1984, and The Catcher in the Rye, whose subversiveness he understood better than most teens: "I felt I gained something that nobody else who had to read it in school got, because I realized all this stuff on my own instead of a teacher saying, 'What do you think so-and-so meant in this moment?'" Then one day at Borders he came upon another seminal text: On the Road, which Hedlund saw as an aesthetic manifesto—it churned up feelings he'd had about small-town Minnesota, when he felt everyone "just wanted to get out"—but also as a movie. Researching the novel's tangled cinematic history, Hedlund discovered that Francis Ford Coppola was, at that time, set to direct it. He sighed. He didn't stand a chance, he thought. In Hollywood's estimation, he was still sucking pond water.
