Garrett Hedlund: rebel without a hairbrush

Of our current crop of actors who could possibly play Dean Moriarty, the blazing spirit of On the Road, who is (to paraphrase Jack Kerouac) mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at once, who burns, burns, burns like a ‘fabulous Roman candle’? Kerouac wanted Marlon Brando; Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt and Colin Farrell were all once slated for the part. But when the book was finally filmed for the first time, director Walter Salles chose Minnesota farm boy done good Garrett Hedlund.

He’s certainly an intense, brooding hot biscuit. When I meet him in Paris, he seems uncomfortable in his gilded suite at Le Meurice, trapped between a velvet sofa and a plate of complex little cakes. His hands are trembling. He looks devastating in a YSL customised suit, which he has accessorised with ostentatiously dirty hair. Subtext: rebel without a hairbrush. He is here because he’s the new face of Yves Saint Laurent’s La Nuit de L’Homme aftershave, replacing Vincent Cassel, no less, but he seems a little overwhelmed by Paris Fashion Week. ‘It’s… interesting,’ he equivocates. He seems anxious about something, impatient. Later, I discover that his girlfriend Kirsten Dunst was waiting for him to finish the interview and come out and play.

They met on the set of On the Road last year and filming the cult novel was an experience that he can’t seem to let go. ‘It’s not easy to leave On the Road behind because I’m such a fan of the generation, such a fan of the material. It’s not like I’ll ever stop reading work by Kerouac, or Burroughs, or Ginsberg. After five years of reading the material and immersing yourself in the jazz, it’s not like you want to deplete or delete that experience.’ Already a keen writer of diaries, poetry, songs and stories, Hedlund started living with Beat spontaneity, leading his fellow cast members on directionless walks at 4am. ‘Dude, you don’t even know where you’re going!’ exclaimed Kristen Stewart one night in Montreal. ‘To say that Garrett is a free spirit,’ said Walter Salles, ‘would be an understatement.’

‘I loved the process of making the movie — you can’t take back those miles. I just feel so honoured to have been a part of it. My love for Walter Salles, I can’t put a number on that. I wouldn’t trade it for the world: the people I met along the way, the cast I got to work with…’ And particularly Kirsten Dunst? Apparently he took her canoeing on their first date — they capsized.

Hedlund sails priapically through the movie, magnetising women and men alike. He marries both Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst, kisses Tom Sturridge (who plays Carlo Marx, the Allen Ginsberg character) and has a decidedly unromantic sexual encounter with Steve Buscemi. Did he have a shot of whiskey before filming that scene? ‘I wish there was whiskey! It was just all in a day’s work,’ he says. After mixed reviews at festival screenings and in the UK, the film is only just on general release in the US — how does he think the freeform sexuality will go down with Middle America? ‘We’ll see. We were just trying to fulfil the book, and there are so many fans… It’s an American classic, so for an American audience to finally see it will be special. What was in the book was in the script and what was in the script was in the daily schedule, so yeah, I knew what I gotta do, and I got on with it.’

Garrett Hedlund grew up on a beef cattle ranch outside Wannaska, Minnesota, the youngest of three. His siblings are called Nathaniel and Amanda, and his father is from Swedish stock, so where did ‘Garrett’ come from? ‘My mom named me,’ he shrugs. ‘I’m sorry I don’t have a fun answer for that. By freakish happenstance, there was another Garrett in my class in elementary school, and I thought it was so common I wanted to change it.’ His parents split up when he was a toddler, and he lived with his father, a wrestling coach and farmer. The down-home life is still part of him — he put in a great performance singing in the film Country Strong (in which he was the centre of a love triangle with Gwyneth Paltrow and Leighton Meester) but he wanted more from an early age, describing the rural isolation to me: ‘There were no malls, no mall scouts, no Los Angeles, no New York nearby…’

At 14 he moved to live with his mother in the comparatively well-connected Scottsdale, Arizona, where he saved his waiter’s tips to pay an acting coach £40 an hour ‘to work on speeches and script material to no purpose’. Modelling gigs for LL Bean and Teen magazine followed. ‘Then someone said to me, “If you want to catch a fox, you’ve got to be in the forest.” So I graduated early and moved to LA when I was 18. Luckily enough, my first movie was Troy.’

He was cast in that all-star turkey as the fatal boy-hero Patroclus, cousin of Brad Pitt (Achilles). It wasn’t a big part but it was an auspicious beginning. He gained 20lb of muscle to join the Myrmidons, then beefed up even further to play football star Don Billingsley in the film version of Friday Night Lights, which preceded the influential TV series of the same name. It turns out he likes living in ‘the forest’, keeping a permanent home in East Hollywood, where he retreats to ‘read, write, do whatever feeds the creative wheel’. He writes his diary compulsively, takes photographs, documents his life. ‘I spill it out as fast as I can… I don’t really edit.’ He took 1,200 photos during the filming of On the Road. ‘I keep an eye on what’s going on round me. I’m an aware person.’

He is lost for words, however, when I ask him to describe the scent of La Nuit de L’Homme. ‘F***!’ he says quietly into his fashionably sprouty facial hair, frustrated with his lack of articulacy. ‘I’ve heard people say it’s very masculine and sensitive at the same time… How does it smell to you?’ We both inhale. He opens his big eyes frankly, and says with Oscar-worthy conviction: ‘It’s just the best cologne I’ve ever smelled.’

For YSL’s new La Nuit de L’Homme campaign, Hedlund appears in a short film in which he stalks around Paris’ Natural History Museum at night, surrounded by the bones of Triassic predators, in search of a beautiful woman. ‘This role is as much of a character as any other I’ve done, which appealed to me. Who is this mysterious guy? What’s he capable of? Does he get lucky at the end of the night?’