Peter Sarsgaard: Sarsgaard Unedited

We'd love him just for making a hero out of a magazine editor (!) in the fact-based Shattered Glass, but Golden Globe-nominated Peter Sarsgaard is grabbing attention outside of media circles, too.

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ANDRE CHAUTARD: Hilary Swank won an Oscar for Boys Don't Cry, and Chloë Sevigny was nominated. There was some talk of you being nominated as well, but it didn't happen. The same Oscar buzz was generated when Shattered Glass came out. Do you take all that with a grain of salt?

PETER SARSGAARD: It's really the same as reviews. It's a struggle to not give it power, but if you give it power, then when you don't get one, you think that your performance is less good. I like my performance in the movie, but I don't believe that this is somehow a better performance than I've ever given before. I think that frequently the Oscar has to do with who you're playing, not just how you played him. The people who win awards are frequently playing characters that are people that we would like to be or we respect.

Q: Did the tale of Stephen Glass change or reinforce your opinion of the media?

A: I think that the media has become very corrupt in this country, and I also believe that one of the cornerstones of a democracy is a good media, so I'm disappointed with the media at large. The interesting question isn't so much why did Stephen Glass lie, but why did people believe him? I think because they want to be entertained. And he fulfills expectations--but no more than, like, Bill O'Reilly does or anyone like that. If people stop believing what they read or read things just to be entertained and not to be edified, then that's why Stephen Glass is dangerous.

Q: You met with the real Chuck Lane, who now writes for the Washington Post, before making the film. Did you become friends?

A: More so after working on the film. I talked to him for about two hours just to learn what his perspective was on what happened. Me, I'm always very cautious. I've played characters based on real people a number of times, and even subconsciously, [people] will present themselves as who they wish they were and not who they really are. It's very difficult to get someone to show you their ugly side.

Q: Nick Nolte's a friend of yours. You've both been attached to a long-gestating film adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Genius and the Goddess, and Nolte recently presented you with your Breakthrough Award for Shattered Glass at Hollywood Life's Breakthrough of the Year Awards. I have to say, though, that we were all pretty concerened about the way he looked that night.

A: Yeah, but, c'mon. The struggles that someone goes through in their private lives are their private lives, and as long as he keeps incorporating who he's becoming as a person and who he is as a person into his work, then who cares what it is? You cannot say that Nick is not fascinating. I don't think anyone was more riveting at that crazy ceremony. I doubt anyone got up and went to the bathroom as he was talking. And you could tell that he was talking about specific things and he was taking his time in a nonperformative way of explaining what he was talking about. That's what I admire about him.

Q: You went full-frontal in 2001's The Center of the World. Did you have to negotiate the nudity like your costar, Molly Parker, did?

A: It's different being a man, you know? Nobody wants to see you naked. The only kind of nudity that you ever have to do as a man is incidental, and to me, looking-for-your-underwear nudity in a movie is different than the camera sweeping up your body, the camera lusting after you. I've never had the camera lust after me.

Q: Other actors shy away from nudity.

A: I don't care. I just did this movie about Alfred Kinsey, and I'm naked in that movie, too, but it's not because I like showing off my body or anything like that. It's just because if you're in a scene where you're getting out of the shower, you should behave as you would.

Q: For The Center of the World, director Wayne Wang took you and Molly Parker to strip clubs for research and paid for lap dances.

A: Yeah, in San Francisco. I think that was more him trying to get the two of us past that awkward stage. Somehow, when you see other people naked at a strip club, it makes you relax about it, because the truth is, after about 20 minutes at a strip club, there is no one who's titillated anymore. [The strippers] smell like cookies, they have fake tans on and the fact that they're naked just becomes irrelevant. I don't think many guys are expecting intercourse when they go into a strip club. They are looking to have somehow some sort of intimate conversation and then be rubbed on their back.

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