But its arrival at the Venice Film Festival came at an unprecedented moment for the industry, with both SAG-AFTRA and the WGA on strike. Memory had an interim agreement from the actors guild, which meant Sarsgaard was there in person to accept the Volpi Cup for best actor—an experience he says he was maybe a bit better prepared for two years after his wife, Maggie Gyllenhaal, won the best-screenplay award there for The Lost Daughter.
But he was also busy researching AI, a central sticking point in the SAG-AFTRA negotiations that hit particularly close to home for an actor who still hangs on to the quaint idea that Hollywood ought to invest in movies about actual human beings. On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, Sarsgaard reflects on what’s changed in Hollywood since his breakthrough role in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry, what it meant for Chastain to pick him as her costar in Memory but not tell him about it, and why he still wants his relatives in Oklahoma to see his movies. Okay, maybe not all of them, but most. Listen below, and read a partial transcript of the conversatio