This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross.

My guest after Joel Edgerton is Australian,

but he's learned a lot about American racism

through the roles he's played.

In the 2016 film Loving, he played Richard Loving,

a white man who married a black woman,

leading to the historic Supreme Court decision,

Loving versus Virginia, the case that overturned state laws

that made interracial marriage illegal.

In the streaming series The Underground Railroad,

he played a determined slave catcher,

and now he stars and Paul Schrader's new film,

the third and Schrader's trilogy of films,

each about a lonely man who has emotionally shut down

to escape the past.

Each of these films has echoes of Schrader's screenplay

for taxi driver and his character Travis Bickle,

God's lonely man.

As a taxi driver, the lead characters in each of these films

is known by their profession, a minister in first reformed,

a card counter in the card counter, a horticulturalist

in the new film, Master Gardener.

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