Week 4 Writing

So when I was given the opportunity to talk about the formation of a celebrity, my thoughts immediately went to a recent favorite. Garrett Hedlund. He’s relatively new to wide spread fame and I’ve inadvertently followed his career since I was in high school. For this analysis, I’m going to primarily stick with his films since he’s been fairly absent from Twitter and online networks. He really didn’t need the media, other than the obvious film industry, to build his reputation. But keeping that in mind, he still has a ways to go, his fame is still very fresh and he still remains semi-unknown. I just couldn’t pass up on the progression of his roles. Garrett Hedlund has done a lot of growing in his roles, breaking out from his pretty boy/secondary submissive male roles to a more dominant/primary character. Hopefully he will continue to this trend because he is, in my opinion, very talented.

When Garrett started acting, he was only 18, just out of high school and his first role was in a major blockbuster alongside A list actors like Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom: Troy. He was pretty young so his role was that of Patroclus, an inexperienced warrior and cousin to the protagonist Achilles(Pitt). The character was very gentle and submissive to his alpha and hyper masculine counterpart played by Pitt. The character is also very “pretty”. Garrett was blond and tan, fitting the typical Hollywood pretty boy and almost a “surfer” look.

After this film, he played a teenager in the film “Friday Night Lights”. Garrett, again, played a submissive role as Don Billingsly. The boy’s father, played by Tim McGraw, is both physically and verbally abusive to his son, expecting more of him. Again, just looking at the characters physically, Garrett has long, lighter hair and is clean shaven. Very pretty in comparison to his gruff, dominating father.

Next came his role in “Four Brothers” as Jack Mercer. To me, this role was (if stripped down to the bare skeleton) the same exact character as Patroclus. Not that I was disappointed by the similarities, but it was striking how much the two roles overlapped. Like “Troy”, Garrett worked with another A lister, Mark Wahlberg. In this film, Wahlberg took Pitt’s place as the dominant alpha to Garrett’s sweeter, softer secondary. In fact, both Patroclus and Jack die, prompting great grief from their “older brother” figures in Wahlberg and Pitt. In both cases the deaths lead to a major plot mark and bring about the climaxes of both films. Basically, he didn’t venture far within his first three movies. HE DID A GREAT JOB, but they were very similar characters.

Skipping past his duds, which I hate to admit…(“Georgia Rule” and “Eragon”….sigh…)…but lets be honest, he had them. We land on the film “Death Sentence”, released in 2007. While I was a fan of Garrett’s prior to seeing this movie, it was “Death Sentence” that made me a die hard fan. Everything he’d done in his previous projects was DROP KICKED out the window. He shaved his head, grew a goatee, gained 20 pounds, and donned fake tats around his throat. All pretty boy imagery, gone. His role was drug dealer, Billy Darley and this was completely different from anything he’d ever done. He was dominant, deadly, and just plain prominent in the film. The only other male that held any power over him, played by John Goodman, he ultimately kills. His ability to play a strong character became evident with his incredible work on this film and he hasn’t returned to a true secondary character since.

Finishing up, I’m going to combine both of his most recent films “Country Strong” and “Tron Legacy”. In “Country Strong”, Garrett played a country singer, Beau. He maintained an older persona, keeping some weight and growing out dark facial hair. Yet again, he played next to Tim McGraw, but unlike last time, he wasn’t the weakling. He, in fact, shows more backbone than McGraw’s character several times throughout the film. In my opinion, he deserved more recognition for this role than he received. His screen time rivaled that of Gwyneth Paltrow, the main character. But, as I said, this character was strong and, for the most part, primary. Tron Legacy? He WAS the main character. Playing Jeff Bridges’s son, Sam Flynn, Garrett returned to a blonder version of himself, but he was lean, strong, and fearless. Top that off with a sharp attitude, he had definitely come a long way from his days as the blonde, whimpy(sorry, but lets be real here), sidekick roles he’d played(and totally rocked) in this previous years.

Garrett Hedlund has proven his ability to play larger, blockbuster roles and his transition into these characters is evident through his body of work.