Garrett Hedlund is the kind of guy who recites his own poetry to Details Mag

I don’t know much about Garrett Hedlund. I know he’s cute in a dirt-lipped artiste way, like a young Ethan Hawke (circa 1994). I know Gwyneth Paltrow compared him to Brad Pitt. I know he rebooted his fragile career with his performance in On the Road, which has gotten him widespread critical acclaim (but few award nominations). I know he’s dating Kiki Dunst. And now that I’ve read his Details interview (he’s the February cover boy), I know that he’s kind of a sweetheart, and he’s also sort of a throwback to the goatee’d, Patchouli-wearing proto-hipsters of the mid to late 1990s. Like, I sent this interview to CB and Bedhead and we started reminiscing immediately about the dudes we knew, loved and hated in the ‘90s. Some highlights from the Details piece:

GH’s drink: “Grey Goose and water.”

How he grew up: “It’s funny… The school I went to was a little farm school in Wannaska, student body 61 or something.” This was in northern Minnesota, about 25 miles from the Canadian border, where Hedlund lived with his father, a wrestling coach and farmer, after his parents divorced when he was a toddler. “There was a kid, the only black kid in our county, Dustin Byfuglien. He won the Stanley Cup a couple years back with the Blackhawks. Out of a class of 21 kids, he and I always had to be on opposite teams on everything because we were the most athletic. We could never be on the same f–king team. But it’s just . . . funny. Two kids from an elementary school in Wannaska, Minnesota. Now he’s won the Stanley Cup and I’m in New York getting interviewed for On the Road.”

How he stood out at the age of 17 while he was auditioning: “I decided to try to be smarter than everyone else.”

After he read On the Road, he started writing: He funneled all that residual On the Road energy into what became a lifelong writing habit, in freewheeling Kerouac fashion. “I spill it out as fast as I can,” he says. “I don’t really edit.” Just about everything that’s happened to him as an adult, from the “uninteresting” to the “wonderful,” has found its way onto paper—in stories, in poems, in journal entries. “In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages,” he ticks off. “In London, 80 pages.”

He got the part when he dropped his pants: In the script, as in the novel and as Neal Cassady was in real life, Dean Moriarty is frequently nude (Kerouac wrote of Moriarty, “He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared. He received the world in the raw”). For a scene in which Sal Paradise tells Moriarty that he’s heading south to Mexico and Moriarty responds slyly, “Hey, Sal, you know, I habla español as well,” the idea occurred to Hedlund: “Maybe I should just whip it out of the pants and say, ‘You know, I habla español as well.'” He went with it, dropping trou on stage during the audition. Afterward, according to Salles, Hedlund read some pages he’d written about “his journey from Minnesota to California—gas stations, strip bars, the solitude of the road. The text was at the same time sharp and personal and had the same jazz-infused quality that you find in Neal Cassady’s letters. He got the character’s essence. The writing was impressive, more so than dropping the pants, although the girls in the room may have argued otherwise.”

He refers to Kirsten Dunst as “my gal” and: They met on the set of On the Road, in which Dunst plays one of Moriarty’s wives, and sometime later struck up a romance after Hedlund took her out on a 3 A.M. canoe ride. “It was not a stable canoe,” he says. “We fell out and had to swim back in mucky, sh–ty water, like golf-pond water.”

GH recites some of his own poetry for Details: “Everything you ever knew seems to slowly be forgotten,” he quotes from a poem of his, an assault against the resignation of maturity that he wrote years ago in Mexico. “All the good nights are just nights, all the good mornings are just mornings, all the dots in the sky are the same dots you’ve been looking at all your life . . .”

Kristen Stewart’s Garrett story: Separating the Beat character from the Beat-inspired actor wasn’t always easy. “Every time I’d see him,” Stewart says of the years-long interim between casting and filming, when financing stalled production, “I’d be like, ‘Are you already doing it?’ He just never let up.” That “free spirit” cited by Salles manifested itself after filming, when Hedlund would “just take off walking,” Stewart says. Once, after Stewart let him lead her on an aimless 4 a.m. exploration of Montreal, she finally protested, “Dude, you don’t know where you’re going!” “But he just kept on walking,” she recalls.

[From Details]

Basically, the point of the story is that no one knows where Garrett Hedlund ends and Dean Moriarty begins. Is that because Garrett is so very Method, or is it because Garrett has adopted his free spirit attitude for his life nowadays? I think he’s a free spirit in real life, but I also think it’s probably a phase. A lot of dudes (and ladies) go through that phase. It’s called being young. It’s called your late teens and early 20s. Garrett is 28, which is kind of old for this kind of stuff, but he has a baby face, so maybe he’s pulling it off. As for his poetry… he’s not a total Franco, but it might happen. More likely, he’s more like Ethan Hawke, who is a published novelist, remember?

Photos courtesy of Details.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

32 Responses to “Garrett Hedlund is the kind of guy who recites his own poetry to Details Mag”

Comments are Closed

We close comments on older posts to fight comment spam.

  1. marie says:

    oh please, he’s Franco in training.. Franco in a prettier package even..

  2. Incredulous says:

    I am neither female nor gay so douchey interviews conducted while sounding like a pompous tosser do not swamp my thighs.

    Don’t get me started on how much I loathe Ethan Hawke either.

  3. I Choose Me says:

    Seems like an interesting, fairly low-key guy. I’ve yet to see On the Road and will have to check out his performance to see if he’s one to watch acting wise.

    • j.eyre says:

      Hey ICM – Happy New Year.

      Let me know when you see OTR – I am still on the fence about it.

      This guy was in the new Tron, right? He was cute in that, I think. I can never see much else when Jeff Bridges is on the screen.

      • I Choose Me says:

        Happy New Year Love. I wish you all good things. *hug*

        You & T.Fanty were slaying me on the Liam Neeson thread. Thanks for the 😀

  4. Winnie says:

    I really have no idea who this guy is, but he was classmates with Dustin Byfuglien! My favorite hockey player! I’m sure I am the only one here excited by this. 🙂

    • Happy21 says:

      LOL, I’ll be excited with you. Because mostly I’m Canadian and hockey is in our blood 🙂

  5. taxi says:

    Looks as if he & Kristen Stewart are on the same shampoo schedule.

  6. Ameila says:

    Oh for God’s sake.
    Has angst gone out of style yet?
    Wake me up when it’s gone.

  7. Really? says:

    Too bad his name isn’t Campbell coz he is mmmmm mmmmm good…

  8. hoya_chick says:

    I find him very attractive. I had never heard of him before that country movie in did with goop, and now On the Road, is he a good actor? I can’t see On the Road Stewart bugs me.

    • Jennipurrr says:

      He looks so much like my ex-boyfriend. Yum, yum, yum. 6 foot 5 and purely delicious. Seeing pics of GH makes me nostalgic.

  9. shocked&appalled says:

    I don’t care what any of you say. I love him. I’d go on a 3am canoe ride or walk around Montreal with him at the drop of a hat. That is all.

  10. Anti-Hippocrites says:

    He is hot, very hot. I will even tolerant his pseudo “deep” artistic countenance

    • TheOriginalKitten says:

      I completely agree. He is my New Dong.

      • hoya_chick says:

        Lol mine too! Everyone else can fight about the usual suspects (Fassy etc) we can have him all to ourselves. He is FINE.

    • Bee says:

      I know! He is so beautiful, i think he is a good actor too and not half as annoying as rob pattison-ryan gosling etc

  11. Kristen says:

    Honestly he / his attitude remind me more of Viggo Mortensen, who just does all sorts of things: art, photography, writing, traveling…

    Also, Montreal is awesome to wander around in the middle of night.

  12. Dani says:

    I really don’t care for anything he says but he is GORGEOUS. I would loveeee to be a fly on that wall, when he dropped his pants.

  13. geekychick says:

    He is super-hot in this photo shoot. I don’t know much about him, except that Lainey roots for him (I think), but my God, the pretty….

    • TheOriginalKitten says:

      I never noticed him until C/B started covering him and posting amazing pics of his hotness.

      He’s up there for me…if he’s a decent actor, then that will just increase the hotness factor. Right now I’m just happy looking at him.

  14. RobN says:

    He sounds like an eighth grader talking about how many pages he’s got done on his term paper. Quantity is not something to be so oddly proud of.

    He’d have made a good Finnick, though.

  15. Nicole says:

    He is so sexy now! I can believe that this is the same guy from the movie Four Brothers.

  16. Happy21 says:

    Oh god he is hot!

    And he can sing…

    And he was in a country music video driving a big truck…

    Sigh…

  17. Diana says:

    Diiiiiirrrrrtyyyyyy, that’s all I can think when I see him. Shower needed immediatly.

  18. Lucija says:

    Oh God I used to like him so much. Why does he have to be so artsy? A guy that looks like him and has the mind of an accountant, now, that would be perfect.

  19. ronnie says:

    His prose reminds me of in Sex and the City, when Samantha has to go see the “harvest to harvest bullshit” in the play Smith is in,hahaha.

    …”My youth!
    The rain came down.
    Hard, then soft.
    It hit the grass.
    Green, then wet.
    Wet, so wet.
    It reminded me of you…
    You always smelled like the rain”

    bahahahahahah

    Garrett is sooo underratedly hot. Pictures do not do him justice. Hes RIDICULOUSLY hot in person. his charisma is just mesmerizing. I was “oh ok”, until I saw him in this V mag interview. WOW.

    Please check it out guys! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaQcOk9gFsY

    hes got brad star power for sure. Dumb, but way less douchey. No arrogance about him, just very stupid.

  20. Ally8 says:

    He looks like a Baldwin crossed with Paul Dano.

    Less interesting and memorable than either.

    I feel like this movie has come out five times already, they’ve been promoting it so long.

  21. SweetTart says:

    Cute until the picture with the cigarette.

  22. Bolivar says:

    He has a stupid look around the eyes like Daniel Baldwin, not to say that he’s not hot, but he has that “medicated” look. Geez, I thought Beyonce was full of hubris – this guy almost makes her look humble. “I decided to be smarter than everyone else” – jesus. The poetry just tops it over into gag territory for me – if I had a dime for every pompous poet I met “Veronica/harmonica/laconic-a…” -doesn’t it just woo your pants off?

    Forgive me for the vinegar but, from appearances & quotes above, this guy seems grossly conceited and overly confident of his abilities. Hope Kiki knows he’s already in a committed relationship with himself.