John Peter Sarsgaard is an American actor, best known for his role in the 2004 comedy-drama Garden State. He landed his first feature role in the movie Dead Man Walking in 1995. He then appeared in the 1998 independent films Another Day in Paradise and Desert Blue. That same...
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor
Nominations
Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture, Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Tele...
Movies
The Magnificent Seven, Experimenter, Green Lantern, Orphan, An Education, Lovelace, Jarhead, Flightplan, Boys Don't Cry, Garden State, Blue Jasmine, Black Mass, Knight and Day, Pawn Sacrifice, The Skeleton Key, Night Moves, Kinsey, Shattered Glass, K-19: The Widowmaker, Dead Man Walking, Rendition, ...
TV Shows
The Slap, The Killing
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Trademark
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Often takes supporting roles instead of headlining a picture, whereby his character is friend to the main character in the film (Kinsey (2004), Shattered Glass (2003), Garden State (2004), Jarhead (2005)).
In my first scene in any movie ever, Sean Penn dragged me out to a swamp, threw me down in the mud, raped and killed me and my girlfriend. We did the scene, we took a shower, put on new clothes and did the scene again. All night long. And that was my big break.
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[on Sean Penn taking him out to dinner during the making of his first film, Dead Man Walking (1995)] It was a sort of I'm-going-to-rape-you-and-we-should-get-to-know-one-another meal. I thought that was nice, and I've tried to extend the same courtesy to my co-stars, especially if I'm going to kill or rape them.
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I'm very much against the death penalty. It's very easy to do a piece about someone who's been railroaded by the system, who's innocent. If you don't believe in the death penalty, you have to take an extreme circumstance - someone who's indefensible - to see if it still applies. Otherwise the death penalty applies in some cases.
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Seriously, in Catholicism, you're supposed to love your enemy. That really impressed me as a kid, and it has helped me as an actor. I don't believe there are bad people. Just people who do bad things. The way that I view the characters I play is part of my religious upbringing. To abandon curiosity in all personalities, good or bad, is to give up hope in humanity. Like somebody who is mumbling on the street - I'm always curious if his words make any sense. I'm interested in lost souls. They possess another sort of secret. (Explaining how his religious upbringing influences his choices as an actor, 2005.)
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When people say, 'The movie sucked, but you didn't'; that means you didn't swing hard enough. You bunted. If the movie goes down, I want to go down with it.
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On his role as a marine in Jarhead (2005): There's a quality my character has about not caving in to the physical or mental demands of your job. I really took that to heart. A lot of my relatives have served, and I have respect for what it means to be a soldier. These guys are carrying a very heavy burden. We joke about marines being strict and severe, but would you want a bunch of hippies running around with guns?.
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When you don't have power, which I still don't in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, you get offered things that you wouldn't ordinarily be offered. Frequently, other people know what I can do more than I do.
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If you go in and audition for roles rather than just be offered them, then you kind of get a chance to kind of discover that you can do something that you didn't think you could do.
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"I just pick the best roles that are left over, and they usually aren't the heterosexual, leading-man, non-drug-addict parts. And once you get into doing them, people know you do them." - On his wide range of offbeat parts.
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Fact
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Appearing on Broadway as Trigorin in "The Seagull." [October 2008]
Is friends with ultra marathon champion Scott Jurek.
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Is an avid runner. Runs 50-60 miles per week.
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His paternal grandfather was of half Danish and half Norwegian descent. His other ancestry includes German, Austrian, Ulster-Scots (Scots-Irish), English, and Irish. His surname originates in Denmark.
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Became a father for the 2nd time at age 41 when his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal gave birth to their daughter Gloria Ray Sarsgaard on April 19, 2012.
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Became a father for the 1st time at age 35 when his fiancée [now wife] Maggie Gyllenhaal gave birth to their daughter Ramona Sarsgaard on October 3, 2006.
In Garden State (2004), Peter's character collects Desert Storm trading cards. In Jarhead (2005), Peter's character fights in Desert Storm.
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His baby face; his soft, strangely ominous voice; and often bizarre, unstable characters have led to him being compared to John Malkovich, who played his father in The Man in the Iron Mask (1998).
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He attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he co-founded a comedy improvisation group called Mama's Pot Roast.
$15 Million
