While the acting community of the Star Wars saga grows with every new project, be it streaming, cinema, gaming or animation, it’s still rare to have all three leads of a project be past stars of the GFFA, but that’s what we have with forthcoming Netflix drama Train Dreams which stars Joel Edgerton (Owen Lars in Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith and Obi-Wan Kenobi), Kerry Condon (Fern’s mother Fara in Skeleton Crew) and Felicity Jones (Jyn Erso in Rogue One). Speaking at a Contenders London panel, the three delved into their characters in the film, out in theaters 7th November and on Netflix on the 20th.
Edgerton fell for the book on first reading it and had originally harboured hopes of directing it: “It had been gifted to me by somebody who knew I would like it. I inquired after the rights for it as a filmmaker. Like Clint, I realized there was an interesting movie in there. The development doesn’t immediately scream ‘adapt this’ and the structure is complicated. When I found out the rights were taken I put the whole idea out of my mind. And then about four years ago, Clint reached out to me. Oh, I thought, somebody knows that I’m obsessed with this book! But it just kind of happened. Maybe it meant that I was connected to the story.”
Jones said of her connection to the project: “The film pivots from really intimate moments, really domestic moments, and even silly moments that everyone recognizes from relationships to these huge themes, and that’s what I loved about it. When I read the script I was ultimately asking, what is the point of why we’re all here? Finding out what that point is is partly through when people die, and grief and knowing things aren’t going to last forever, and therefore, how does that affect how we behave in everyday life?”
Condon added that she connected with the film’s observance of the natural world: “That was the main reason I wanted to do the movie. Nature is almost like another character in the movie; there’s a spiritual side to nature that heals people. I have a farm in Washington and we shot it in Washington, Pacific, Northwest, so as we shot it the sun was going down, the birds were chirping, and it felt very spiritual. It was a very beautiful process.”
