Peter Sarsgaard turns 53: the best roles of a movie star

On March 7, American actor Peter Sarsgaard celebrates his birthday. In his nearly 30-year career, he has played in films of various genres and scales. Sarsgaard embodied villains in the spy action movie Knight Rider with Tom Cruise and the western The Magnificent Seven with Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, and thanks to his roles in Batman and Green Lantern, he is recognized by comic book fans.

In this article, Obozrevatel has collected 5 of the most iconic images of the star birthday boy.

1. "Memory", 2023

Peter Sarsgaard's latest work will be available in Ukrainian cinemas starting March 28. This is a melodramatic film directed by Michel Franco. The actor's partner on the set is Oscar-winning Jessica Chastain (It 2, Interstellar). The world premiere of the film took place at last year's Venice Film Festival, a major class A film event that is part of the so-called Big Three film festivals (along with Cannes and Berlin). There, Sarsgaard won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, beating Jacob Elordi (Priscilla), Adam Driver (Ferrari), and Bradley Cooper (The Maestro).

The plot of the film revolves around a man and a woman. She is a social worker and single mother who lives a routine life. He is a man who has memory problems and forgets what happened to him a few hours ago. This peculiarity leads to an unexpected and somewhat awkward encounter between the two characters. This incident brings them closer together and makes them realize that they are not strangers after all.

2. "Dopesick", 2021

For his performance in this series, Sarsgaard was nominated for an Emmy Award, the main US television award. He competed for a statuette in the category of Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie but lost out to Murray Bartlett from White Lotus.

"Dopesick" is an 8-episode drama series from the executive producers of The Handmaid's Tale and Dexter. The central story is the opioid epidemic in the United States. The plot is based on Beth Macy's documentary book "Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America". Most of the characters in the series are fictional or constructed, but Sarsgaard embodied one of the real-life figures on the screen – Rick Mountcastle, a lawyer who is trying to prove that the drug epidemic of the 1990s was the fault of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies.

3. "Mr. Jones" , 2019

Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland is a famous Polish director. On March 21, Ukrainian cinemas will release her new work The Green Border, which caused a political scandal in Poland and at the same time became a box office hit and the Best Film at the Polish Film Awards.

Five years ago, in 2019, she released her film The Price of Truth, which was made with the participation of Ukraine. The film has a very Ukrainian context: it tells the story of a British journalist, Gareth Jones, who arrived in the USSR in 1933, traveled to Ukraine, and told the world about the Holodomor.

Peter Sarsgaard embodied a real villain here – Walter Duranty, a reputable journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner who played along with the Kremlin's propaganda covered up the crimes of the Soviet regime and contributed to the silencing of the Holodomor in the world press.

4. "Blue Jasmine", 2013

This is a comedy-drama by the famous Woody Allen. Cate Blanchett (Tar, Carol) and Alec Baldwin (The Departed) played the leading roles. The main character is Jasmine, a woman living a perfect life. However, everything goes wrong when her wealthy husband is found guilty of fraud. Then the heroine tries to escape from her problems and start her life over by moving in with her sister.

The main attraction of this film is the performance of Cate Blanchett, who won an Oscar for her role. But the audience will also enjoy watching Sarsgaard's performance as a widowed diplomat with whom Jasmine tries to establish a new relationship.

5. "Shattered Glass", 2004

One of the actor's earliest roles, the kind that is commonly referred to as "breakthrough". This work earned Sarsgaard nominations for a number of awards, including a Golden Globe.

The film tells the true story of Stephen Glass, a reporter for the American magazine The New Republic. The journalist made a name for himself by writing vivid stories. As it turned out later, many of them were fictions fabricated by the author. The film depicts the rise and fall of Stephen Glass (played by Hayden Christensen, widely known for the Star Wars franchise). Peter Sarsgaard portrayed Charles Lane, the editor of The New Republic, in the movie.