For actor Matthias Schoenaerts, playing the steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak in the big-screen adaptation of “Far from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy was a profound experience. The 37-year-old Belgian says that the character helped him shape his personal life.
Truly relatable even in 2015, the exuberant story of Victorian farmer Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) starts out a simple country girl who has inherited her uncle’s farm, and becomes a fierce-willed, impulsive heiress who is faced with a myriad of life choices. She’s surrounded, and confounded, by intriguing suitors, one of them is the down to earth farmer Gabriel Oak (Schoenaerts).
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