Joel Edgerton Explains His Attraction to Kinky Boots: “I just really loved the script. It's very hard for a script about a shoe factory and a drag queen to not stand out of the pile, you know? And certainly when the first page has got Kinky Boots written on it… Then I read the script and then it was very basic - I met the director.
I was very sure that I certainly wasn't going to get the part in this film because I was Australian, it's a British film, but it sort of worked out. I'm really, really glad that it did.”
The True Story of Steve Pateman: “Once I sort of met them and got the script, then I made the phone call saying to my agent, ‘I really like this theme.’ She said, ‘Do you realize that it's a true story?’ I'm like, ‘No, this can't be a true story.’ Subsequently I've met Steve Pateman, who the story's about, and got to meet his family. It is quite a remarkable true story, especially once you go to the place and you meet this guy, and you look at the town. You can't put all the elements together and work out how this guy ended up making these boots and getting away with it in a town like that. I know what it's like because I grew up in a small town. Everybody knows everybody's business. When you do go out on a limb with something and throw a splash of color out there, it's quite easy for you to shut yourself down in a sense like, ‘I don't want to stand out in a place like this.’"
These Boots Weren’t Made for Walking: Edgerton confirmed the boots were definitely tough to walk in. “Well, yeah, they are just hard to walk in anyway. I think men or women, no matter how much experience you've got, after a certain amount of time they're going to hurt you. But I've had experience of it before because I've been in a play where I had to wear high heels. Coming to it again 10 years later, I didn't realize how much like riding a bike it was. I put them back on, stood up, and went, ‘Oh, this is alright. I'm not going to fall over.’"
Edgerton’s character, Charlie, is never seen wearing the shoes his family’s factory originally made. “There was that choice for us to really want Charlie to sit outside the family business and not really want to partake in it,” explained Edgerton. “It's not really until he realizes that the company's possibly failing that the pressure not so much comes from the outside but from inside, sort of like, ‘I can't be the one to fire ...,’ something that's very easy to relate to. I think that's where a lot of parental pressure actually comes from. It's not entirely just from parents, but from the children themselves. Yeah, old Charlie just likes his old, white, scruffy sneakers, and certainly not the Trickers' shoes. I guess that's just symbolic of him not really wanting to participate in the business.”
The Choices His Character Makes: Why did he then decide to persevere? Edgerton said, “In my own life, my pressures always come from me rather than from my parents to do what I want and succeed. But it really does relate to them, and I think that for Charlie, he really sort of finds himself at that point. He's got an out. He could easily say, ‘Stuff this. I don't need to be lugging this way.’ Something else happens to him ... that thought that's crystallized in one of the lines in the film is, ‘I guess I just didn't want to be the last photo in the line.’ You know, the Price who left nothing. That pressure really is coming from himself. ‘I cannot fail. I have to succeed.’ Plus, he's also feeling in relationships with the workers, and as Lola says later, he's someone who recognizes that a factory is its workers and not its bricks. I think that's also part. And it's a very working class mentality as well. You take responsibility of the people that are on your team as well.”
Letting Go of His Vanity to Stroll the Catwalk in Thigh High Boots and Boxers: “You see, I'm a really interesting person in that if you want me to sing karaoke, I literally almost have to be so drunk that I'm clinically dead. You know what I mean? So I'm not extroverted in that regard. And yet, when I am on stage, in a theater production or like with Kinky Boots, I actually really relish those scenes. So there's some real kind of thing that needs to be explored on my personal time. For instance, that day wearing the boots in Kinky Bootswas my favorite day of shooting. In fact, you could hardly get the boots off me. It wasn't like, ‘I can't go. Let's get this over and done with. Blindfold all the extras.’ I was quite happy.”
Page 2: Edgerton's Next Movie - Hellion
