Tommy McArdle is an editorial assistant on the Movies team at PEOPLE. Tommy joined PEOPLE in 2022.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt always keeps his family at the forefront of his mind.

While speaking with PEOPLE recently about his new murder mystery movie Killer Heat, Gordon-Levitt, 43, says that he is not sure he would have connected with its story and characters well enough to take the film on if he were not a husband and father.

"I am lucky enough to have a family of my own that I'm so grateful for," the actor, who has been married to tech industry entrepreneur Tasha McCauley since 2014, says. "And imagining what it would be like to be without them just makes me hurt."

In Killer Heat, Gordon-Levitt portrays a private detective named Nick Bali who is hired to investigate the accidental death of a young man from a rich family on the Greek island Crete. Bali's estrangement from his own wife and children is explored throughout the movie as he takes on the mystery in Greece, and the actor tells PEOPLE that the fictional character's perspective stuck with him.

"Even though that hurt is imaginary, well, if you take that imaginary hurt and you start diving deeper into it and adding more complexity to the scenario, that's what it is to play a character like this," he says. "I don't know if that I would have been able to - I don't know that I would have been able to resonate with it so strongly if I didn't have a family of my own."

Gordon-Levitt does not often share information about his life with McCauley, with whom he shares three children; he revealed in July that the couple had welcomed their daughter almost two years before. The couple's sons, whose names have never been shared publicly, joined the family in August 2015 and June 2017, respectively.

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While speaking with PEOPLE about Killer Heat, which also stars Shailene Woodley and Richard Madden, Gordon-Levitt noted that the details of his character's family for the movie were not directly adapted from Jo Nesbø's The Jealousy Man, which the film is based on.

"I think [director Philippe Philippe Lacôte] heard me talking about my family and saw how much I cared about that and said. 'This is the kind of emotional grounding that this character needs,' " Gordon-Levitt says. " 'And with you playing this part, I feel like what if this character had family?' And the idea really took hold of all of us."

Though Gordon-Levitt and McCauley typically keep their lives private, the actor wished his wife well on her birthday very publicly during his June 19 appearance on The Tonight Show, during which he performed a rendition of Taylor Swift's 2019 hit "Lover" in her honor. The couple will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary on Dec. 20.