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'Dark Matter's' Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly talk S2's marital disintegration and the humility of hanging on wires (interview)
'It makes you think about how you can be a better person in life. And there’s always room for improvement.'
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The eighth episode of Apple TV's "Dark Matter" season 2 has just dropped, and we're all on the edge of our seats trying to guess how the strange saga of Jason (Joel Edgerton) and Daniela (Jennifer Connelly) Dessen is going to finish up. Not even fans of the books know, as this superb adaptation of NYT bestselling author Blake Crouch's 2016 novel broke out of its source material for season 2.
For Edgerton and Connelly, "Dark Matter" has been a whirlwind project as their characters search for a safe alternate universe while being pursued by a multiplicity of Jasons. The physical rigors and emotional toll of shooting the show and presenting its nuanced storytelling often proved difficult.
"There's two exhaustions that I’ve found in movie work," Edgerton tells Space. "It's either mental exhaustion from going to dark emotional places in your brain or complex dialogue stuff. Then there's the physical challenges, like for doing a fight scene. One of the weirdest ones on 'Dark Matter' was doing a gravity scene where we’re dangling on wires inside The Box. There's something deeply exhausting about it and a bit humiliating. You feel like a human teabag."
Connelly was also a part of that tough sequence and reflects on Edgerton’s tireless fortitude.
"Joel's schedule on this show is really brutal," she notes. "He's in almost all of it. This season is better, but season 1 was crazy for him. It’s surprising; sometimes the things that are most difficult are the ones you don’t anticipate. That's more exhausting at the end of the day after trying to get something to work that you didn’t think would be tricky. I like the days that are tiring because you feel drained because you’ve explored a lot in a scene. That's a nice feeling."
For Edgerton, the simplest thing to remember is that when practicing your craft, always make sure that you go home each day feeling satisfied with what you shot.
"There's nothing worse than going home and thinking that you didn’t get the best out of yourself," he reveals. "As they say, as actors we're not digging trenches. It's not hard physical labor; it's a different kind of thing. Until actually I shot a movie where I had to dig a trench."
Working with Blake Crouch on the series and its unnerving portrait of a marriage strewn across the infinite multiverse has produced new insights into their own lives.