Jake with Peter Sarsgaard at the 17th Annual Palm Springs Film Festival, 2006."The 37-year-old actor is known for playing hard, uncomfortable roles with a weird sort of laconic intensity since making his debut in 1995 as a Sean Penn murder victim in "Dead Man Walking."
He graduated to being a killer in "Boys Don't Cry," a rich guy with a fetish for a prostitute in "The Center of the World," a stoned gravedigger in "Garden State," Liam Neeson's lover in "Kinsey"
and a disturbed sharpshooter in "Jarhead.""I think sometimes I've been told that I play a villain sympathetically. I don't think that's actually what I'm doing," he says. "I'm just trying to get at the undercurrent of something."
Sarsgaard these days is plumbing those undercurrents on stage, making his Broadway debut in an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" alongside Kristin Scott Thomas, Mackenzie Crook and Carey Mulligan. He's a newcomer to the production, which began last year at London's Royal Court Theatre.
He's got a typical Sarsgaard role — Trigorin, a tortured writer who drives a rival to suicide and a young lover to ruin. He's grown a lush beard for the part and radiates both charisma and sleaze.
On the stoop, Sarsgaard is still buzzing about his debut deployment of an English accent the night before. He had previously been using his natural American voice, which made him the odd man out in the show.
The main reason was that it wasn't his turn to act. He and Gyllenhaal like to alternate the times they work, and she was off filming "Crazy Heart" with Jeff Bridges in New Mexico.
That yearning for realness has landed Sarsgaard respect and a quirky career. The fact that he traded Manhattan a few years ago for a modest home in a tree-lined, family neighborhood in Brooklyn's Park Slope is another stab at keeping it real.He's passionately political and does public service announcements to encourage young people to vote. It doesn't take long to identify his own blue-state leanings: On this day he wears an American Civil Liberties Union baseball cap with the slogan "Freedom Can't Protect Itself."
Sarsgaard, who says his favorite performances are in movies that no one saw, seems to relish the fact that he's mostly only recognized in certain demographics. As the coffee bar incident shows, he's usually left unmolested.
"The type of thing that I love is walking down the street and when someone comes up to me and says, 'I saw one of your movies the other night and it affected me', he says".Seagull - theplay
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