Garrett Hedlund
By Jeff Bridges
Photography Robbie Fimmano
The artfully untamed heart and wild bohemian soul of Hollywood’s most promising new leading man.
It’s not a stretch to say that many of the contemporary notions in America about what art does and how artists live were formed in the 1950s and the 1960s. Postwar bohemia, the rise of rock-’n'-roll, the emergence of the counterculture—at first resistant, then demonstrative, then angry, then sneering—all helped fan the flames of the idea that popular culture means something (precisely what remains a subject of constant debate), as well as the belief that committing oneself to a life of making art might possibly be akin to doing one’s incremental part in changing the world (also a subject continually debated).
Of course, Garrett Hedlund—actor in films such as Friday Night Lights (2004), Four Brothers (2005), Georgia Rule (2007), Country Strong (2010), and Tron: Legacy (2010); amateur photographer; budding musician; and native Minnesotan—wasn’t a part of any of those cultural revolutions, nor was he even alive yet to experience them. But in a pair of new films that offer fictionalized looks at two monumental—and monumentally romanticized—moments in the evolution of American bohemia, Hedlund gets to step inside characters at the white-hot center of things. The first of those films, which hits theaters in December, is Walter Salles’s long-gestating adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, in which Hedlund stars alongside Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, and Kirsten Dunst as the inimitable Dean Moriarty, the novel’s itinerant, sex-drugs-and-philosophy-fueled surrogate for lionized Beat figure Neal Cassady, who crisscrosses the United States with Kerouac’s alter-ego, a writer named Sal Paradise (Riley), in search of jazz, soul, and nirvana. The second film, due out next year, is the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which co-stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, and John Goodman, and takes loose inspiration from the late singer-songwriter Dave Van Ronk’s posthumous memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, set in the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s that spawned the likes of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.
For Hedlund, who says he was inspired as a teenager by reading books like On the Road, and is himself a fledgling singer-songwriter, both films presented fantasy-camp-like opportunities to smack-talk like a hipster and inhabit other eras. But the films also point to the kind of power that these sorts of alternative American Dream stories still hold. There is a notion baked into the country’s mythology—as well as Hollywood’s—that while both America and art are about expression and exercising a certain kind of freedom, they are also about self-invention and leaving behind who you were so you can go off and become who you want to be. In addition to On the Road and Inside Llewyn Davis, Hedlund also recently wrapped work on the indie drama Lullaby, from first-time director Andrew Levitas, in which he plays the estranged son of a dying man who returns to make peace with his ailing father. Jeff Bridges, who played Hedlund’s father in Tron: Legacy (and, of course, starred in the original Tron), recently caught up with the 28-year-old actor at home in Los Angeles.
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