JOEL EDGERTON is sitting in a sunlit room in London, wearing a flatcap and a scarf looped loosely at the neck. We’re speaking a few days ahead of a big announcement: Edgerton has been tapped as the new face of Worn Well, the new campaign from R.M.Williams, built on the idea that character is something built, developed, worn in and earned.

“I’ve actually had a long history with RM,” he tells Esquire. After decades spent living out of Los Angeles, and now London, his voice hasn’t lost a trace of home: the consonants still soften, the vowels still carry that familiar Australian drawl.

“I guess I started wearing their boots in my 20s.” Two decades and, by his own count, close to a dozen pairs later, when the people at R.M.Williams came calling the deal had arguably already signed itself.

Accepting the offer was made easier by the fact Edgerton clearly believes in the product. He has eight pairs of R.M.Williams boots with him in London and four or five more back in Sydney, bought over two decades, long before anyone from the company got in touch. “It wasn’t like me going, let me pretend I like this thing because I already do,” he says. For an actor who has largely stayed out of the endorsement world, watching plenty of his peers do well out of watches and cologne without ever feeling the pull himself, it made the decision straightforward.

 “I’ve always felt like an actor, not a salesperson,” he says. “This one just made sense.”

The campaign pairs new season styles, among them the Craftsman, Yearling, Rigger and Gardener, with boots pulled from Edgerton’s own collection. One pair dates back to 2002: sandy-coloured, kangaroo leather, eight-hole lace-ups, picked up on the set of Ned Kelly, when R.M. Williams offered the cast some merchandise. “I wasn’t really in the business then of knowing what it was like to get free stuff,” he says. “Now I’m an old pro.” The boots have long been discontinued, but he still wears them, still packs them wherever he goes, and still hasn’t dropped the idea that RM might bring them back one day. “You guys should remake these,” he told them on set, all those years ago. “Let’s see if it happens.”

At 52, Edgerton’s credits are enviable, balancing blockbuster with independent productions; taut, emotional dramas and thrillers. Early days in Australian cult flicks like Sample People (alongside Kylie Minogue and Ben Mendelsohn), and Erskineville Kings with Hugh Jackman.

Two Star Wars films and a Disney+ spinoff. A cage fighter in Warrior. A Navy seal in Zero Dark Thirty. The bellicose Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great  Gatsby. He garnered an AACTA for playing a standover man in Animal Kingdom. He wrote, directed and starred in a home-invasion thriller, then did the same with a film about conversion therapy. Earlier this year, in Train Dreams, he picked up a Golden Globe nomination for his pensive, layered performance. It wasn’t his first: a decade earlier, Loving brought the same nomination, for playing one half of the real-life couple behind the US Supreme Court case that struck down bans on interracial marriage.

How does he pick the right scripts? 

“It’s always a gut thing for me,” says Edgerton. 

“The first thing is I read a script and go, did I love reading that story? And then what would I get to do within it, and how do I feel about the character? So story first, character second.” Only once he’s hooked does he start asking who’s directing, who else is cast and who he’d get to work alongside. Money has never been the deciding factor. 

“I’m genuinely not really driven first and foremost by money in any instance,” he says. “It’s really like, all right, this is what do I get from a project?”

Since having kids, three new questions have joined the list: where, when, and for how long. “I’d be happy to go shoot anywhere… now I’m like, well, where are the kids and family maybe going to come and spend time with me, or how long am I going to be away from them?” 

Train Dreams put that math to the test. The shoot meant weeks in Spokane, Washington, a place he’s quick to praise but not somewhere that suits the family long-term. “No offence to Spokane,” he says, “but it doesn’t suit us as a family.” But it was his wife, Christine, who pushed for it anyway, because she could see what the part meant to him. “She knew how much I was in love with that project and the director and the whole idea of it,” he says. “We’re going to Spokane, so we make it work.”

But fashion has never been part of the contract, at least not deliberately. Edgerton has never courted the red carpet scene, but perhaps that’s how he’s ended up carving out his own space on the lists that regularly catalogue the style choices of those who walk it. There’s a naturalness to Edgerton that only comes from understanding that this is only part of the deal, not the point. It also adds to the sense of rightness that R.M.Williams would choose him for their campaign. Their focus is on a product that performs.

“I’ve spent years working in different countries and cities,” Edgerton says as we wrap up the interview.

“I’ll find something I like. There’s no point complaining about anywhere you are.” London holds most of the family’s things at present, for practical reasons, his wife’s work and the kids’ schooling among them. Australia stays the reference point regardless. On sets around the world, he says he still notices R.M.Williams boots on crew members’ feet. “You feel some weird pride of ownership over it,” he says.

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