“We get to dive into humanity’s difficulties like weird soul explorers”: Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield on After the Hunt

A new film from Luca Guadagnino always raises eyebrows, and often pulses too. Having catapulted Timothée Chalamet to stardom in Call Me by Your Name (2017) and turned him into a lovestruck cannibal in Bones and All (2022), Guadagnino released two very different films in 2024 – tennis-player love-triangle jaunt Challengers and the sultry, disarmingly horny William Burroughs adaptation Queer. Now After the Hunt, the Italian director’s 10th fiction feature, tackles an alleged sexual assault and its aftermath. Though not based one real-life case, screenwriter Nora Garrett was inspired by various American university campus incidents that attracted media attention in the period following her graduation from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013.

Julia Roberts plays Yale philosophy professor Alma, a tightly-wound academic evidently self-medicating prescription pills for an unknown complaint and harbouring a secret or two from her past. In her circle are colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) and her protégée, brilliant student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). When one drunken night Maggie reports Hank to Alma, the professor’s reaction and the subsequent fallout engulfs the campus and, like a #MeToo black hole, pulls in people and intersectional themes: gender, race, wealth and how each are used and abused. 

The day after the film’s UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, a giggly but engaged Edebiri and Garfield sat down for a brief chat about making the film.

Lou Thomas: Nora Garrett’s script probes some big themes: morality, ethics, love, desire and the ways in which we are haunted by our past. As actors, how do you prepare for a film like this?

Andrew Garfield: A lot of time spent with each other felt most paramount because of the trust that we needed to develop in order to be able to treat each other the way we treat each other in the film, and be able to wink at each other through it [and] be, like, “It’s okay. I love you, I love you.”

That was a sincere thing that we all had with each other, that Luca engendered and Julia engendered, and I think we all just dug along. Gives me chills actually, even as we speak, just the good fortune that that’s our lives. That’s crazy that we get to healthily dive into our own and humanity’s difficulties while holding hands like weird soul explorers. This is a gift of a life. What a weird go around this one is, that we get to be so lucky [now]. Who knows, we were down a coal mine probably on the last one.

Ayo Edebiri: That makes me think also of trust and truth. We are all playing these characters who have really different internal truths and making sure that you have that as downloaded, but also as fluid as possible. But having that truth while also there’s this truth between us that’s like, okay, we’re good and we’re safe and we can do these kind of messy, hard things with each other.

Andrew, you said last night at the premiere that a few of you stayed with Julia at her house in San Francisco before filming. Aside from making banana bread for you, what’s Julia like as a host?

Edebiri: We were fortunate enough for the two of us, Chloë [Sevigny] and Luca – Michael [Stuhlbarg] was on Broadway being nominated for a Tony – but we were able to go to Julia’s and do some rehearsals. We were also able to do our early camera tests and first initial fittings and get started a little bit before we started shooting. We had a few weeks in between because some of us were wrapping up jobs; I think I was finishing The Bear and [Andrew was] finishing a film, but we were able to start that process of knowing each other and knowing the script before we got into it.

AG: The banana bread is a microcosm of what she’s like as a host. Everything is metaphorically the best banana bread. Not pretentious – homemade, delicious, simple ingredients. Simple, great produce. … she is great produce. Essential goods. Not florid and fancy, but absolutely quiet luxury. [laughing at himself as he rambles on] I hate myself.

There’s a great deal of spoken dialogue in this film. As actors do you find this enriching and exciting or do you feel “this is going to be quite hard work” and a big slog? Or is it somewhere in the middle?

AE: I think enriching and exciting. That’s the joy: every job is different. You’re exploring text in a different way and with this, I think playing these very verbose heady sort of people who emotionally are very primal and stunted was a really fun juxtaposition.

AG: Yeah. It’s rare you get to do that on the screen.

The film drops some big philosophical names. Were there any books you read, either at the request of Luca or of your own volition, in preparation for the film?

AG: I like philosophy anyway, so I am like a master of none in all these regards. It was important to be as learned about the specific things as we [could be]. And what a wonderful thing to be able to do. To be like, okay, you get to go and be a faux philosophy student for the next couple of months while you get ready to pretend to be a philosophy professor or student. What a great gift.

The person that I landed on that I like is [Greek philosopher] Epicurus. I like that vibe. It’s very Julia Roberts actually and very Luca Guadagnino. Again, simple ingredients – and good folk, community, joy and pleasure, but not excessively, not bacchanalian. I like a lot of modern mythologists, like Joseph Campbell and Michael Meade. I think Hank is into maybe misappropriating, indigenous philosophies, which I find interesting and kind of disturbing.

After the Hunt screened at the 69th BFI London Film Festival and is in cinemas from 17 October.