Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty has now been playing in limited release for a couple of weeks after sweeping a number of early critics’ awards. Much of the attention and praise has deservedly been heaped on actress Jessica Chastain for her portrayal of the CIA operative at the center of finding Osama bin Laden, but an equally interesting character, one introduced in the very first scene, is a CIA interrogator named Dan who uses various torture techniques to get information out of their captives.
We’re not going to get into the right or wrong of those tactics, but instead we want to talk about Jason Clarke, the actor who plays Dan, someone who is definitely on the rise going by his performance in this movie and what he has coming up. It may surprise some to learn that the Australian actor has been acting since the mid-90s though he’s only recently started getting attention in this country as the star of the short-lived Fox show “The Chicago Code.”
Since then, Clarke co-starred in John Hillcoat’s Lawless as the burly and brutal moonshiner Howard Bondurant, but that didn’t give us a chance to really see what he can do like Zero Dark Thirty as Clarke’s character is an integral part of the ensemble cast around Chastain. Next year, he’ll be seen I two very different movies, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, plus he just started filming an alternate Lincoln movie called The Green Blade Rises, produced by no less than Terrence Malick.
ComingSoon.net attended the New York junket for the movie back in early December, which was well before any of the controversy about the film’s stance on torture began surfacing, so we didn’t have a chance to ask Clarke’s take on it, being that his character is involved with most of those scenes.
Instead, in the video interview below we spoke with Clarke about:
* How he was contacted about the movie
* How he prepared for a role as a CIA interrogator
* Starring in his third movie with Jessica Chastain (after Lawless & Texas Killing Fields)
* Shooting the intense and dialogue-heavy scenes
* The experience working with directors like Baz Luhrmann and Roland Emmerich
* Whether it’s hard to picture what a movie like ZD30 might look like from the script
