86 minutes with … Peter Sarsgaard

The bee-raising, orchard-tending Brooklyn aristocrat on reading Nabokov and making films with Maggie.

- By Katja Vujić

Peter sarsgaard is sitting across from me, spoiling the ending of Lolita. It’s early December, and we’re at Rucola, an Italian spot in Boerum Hill that he frequents, and the conversation has turned to Vladimir Nabokov, whose work I’ve somehow never read. But that possibility doesn’t seem to cross Sarsgaard’s mind when he starts to describe one of the novel’s final scenes, in which the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, corners Clare Quilty, who, like Humbert, is obsessed with 12-year-old Lolita. “He shoots him and he shoots him. Then he goes up the stairs, and he shoots and shoots and shoots,” Sarsgaard says as I nod along. “The amount of anger that Humbert has for a guy doing the same thing that he does, it’s like he’s killing himself. It’s almost comedic. Such a clever book.”

When Sarsgaard talks about books— which he does often over the course of our lunch—he speaks with genuine awe. These are apt digressions given Sarsgaard’s newest role as Professor Hardy, a hotshot academic, in his wife Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut,