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Tag: after the hunt

  • Julia Roberts Reveals Why She Was “Scared” of Her ‘After the Hunt’ Co-Star Chloë Sevigny

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    See, Julia Roberts is just like everyday people; she also gets intimidated by celebrities.

    The Oscar winner recently stopped by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to talk about her new movie, After the Hunt, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Roberts stars alongside Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri and Michael Stuhlbarg in the film, but there was one other co-star who she admitted “scared” her.

    “I understand there was one castmember, so I hear, that was intimidating to you, which I find hard to believe,” host Stephen Colbert said, as Roberts confirmed the actor in question was Chloë Sevigny. She then proceeded to recall her first time meeting the Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story actress.

    “The fabulous Chloë Sevigny, who I had never met before and Ayo had never met before, and Luca has worked with a number of times because she’s fabulous,” Roberts said. “And we were all rehearsing at my house, which was a joy and a privilege, and one afternoon we were rehearsing, we were at the kitchen table and you know we’re really grinding it out — not really, we had our heads down, let’s just say — and the producer came in from the living room and he said, ‘Oh, Chloe should be here any minute.’”

    She continued, “I looked up and my eyes just happened to catch Ayo’s eyes. We looked at each other and I said, ‘I’m scared!’ And she goes, ‘Me too.’”

    From left: Michael Stuhlbarg, Ayo Edebiri, Julia Roberts, Chloë Sevigny and Andrew Garfield attend the After the Hunt photocall during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on Aug. 29, 2025, in Venice, Italy.

    When Guadagnino questioned why they were scared to meet Sevigny, Roberts said she simply replied, “Because it’s Chloe.” Next thing she knew, Sevigny was knocking at her door, and the Pretty Woman star recalled them all freezing and then “looked at each other.”

    As Guadagnino sat there, still confused, Roberts said the filmmaker proceeded to tell her, “‘What? You live here. You have to answer the door.’”

    That’s when the Ticket to Paradise star remembered jumping up and trying to make her cheeks look pink so she would “look fetching and appealing” before officially introducing herself to the iconic Sevigny. Roberts said she finally opened the door and followed up with an ecstatic, “Hi!” However, Sevigny allegedly greeted Roberts in her normal tone.

    “I wanted to start crying,” Roberts quipped to Colbert. “I think she was just thinking, ‘This is where you live?’” In all seriousness, the Erin Brockovich star praised Sevigny, describing her as “exceptional and eccentric.”

    But Roberts also noted she and Edebiri weren’t the only ones fangirling over the American Horror Story alum that day, as her daughter also had to leave the room.

    The actress said after Sevigny knocked at the front door, her daughter went, “‘Going through the garage. See you later, Mom.’ She was vapor trails, because we’re all scared of Chloe. She’s part of the fear.” Roberts joked that Edebiri also asked to leave because she was so intimidated by the Boys Don’t Cry star.

    Thankfully, they all put their fears aside and were able to film After the Hunt together. The movie follows a college professor who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroad when a star student levels an accusation against one of her colleagues, which then threatens to expose a dark secret from her own past. The pic is set for a limited release Oct. 10 before expanding wide Oct. 17.

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    Carly Thomas

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  • Julia Roberts Says ‘After the Hunt’ Is “About Love and Forgiveness”

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    Julia Roberts has said she hopes her new movie After the Hunt sparks conversations, and the film’s stars have indicated they are happy to embrace the uncertainty and questions provoked by the story’s conflicting narratives, many of which remain unanswered.

    Still the team behind the Luca Guadagnino-directed campus thriller, which explores the fallout when promising PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Andrew Garfield‘s professor character Hank of sexual misconduct and how this affects Maggie’s mentor Alma (Julia Roberts), who’s also close friends and colleagues with Hank, did answer some questions following After The Hunt‘s New York Film Festival premiere Friday night.

    When asked how much they wanted to know about what was left unresolved for the audience, Garfield, Edebiri and Michael Stuhlbarg all seemed to welcome the film’s ambiguity.

    “[It’s] fascinating to play with what’s conscious, what’s unconscious, in terms of what’s driving these people, what motives are hidden from ourselves,” Garfield said. “I feel like we all feel like we are the heroes of our own stories. I think there’s quite beautiful moments of reckoning, self reckoning, self revelation, that each of our characters have in this film, and in those moments, it’s the kind of horrifying staring into the abyss of the kind of horrifying mirror that these characters are faced with at certain points. … I think there is a kind of a reckoning that this person, who believes himself to be a kind of humanist and a kind of great professor … and a guy that’s trying to open and unlock all of his students and someone who’s daring and trying to get people closer to the edges of their own hearts and the centers of their own hearts, that he’s faced with something that he hadn’t previously recognized in himself.”

    Stuhlbarg, who plays Alma’s psychiatrist husband Frederick, added that the word “ambiguity” felt “very appropriate for this experience.”

    “It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck,” he said of the film’s story. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you feel something’s coming. And that was kind of the experience, ambiguous, of playing it is that, you know, there’s many layers to this gorgeous text and to these extraordinary performers, and you kind of throw yourself into it to pull out what you think is going to be useful, and then you throw yourself into it and things happen. But being outside of the center of that action, I know something’s going on. I don’t exactly know what it is, but I’m pressing and I’m watching it, and I think it’s a hard place to be and a wonderful place to play, because you’re kind of on tenterhooks the whole time. And I never know what it’s going to be and having Luca throw extraordinary things at us during the process of being in that unsurety gives you moments of direction and moments of flourishing and moments of silliness and moments of depth, and you just ride it, but it’s a very appropriate word for the world we were inhabiting.”

    And Edebiri, in particular, praised the rehearsal period at Roberts’ house as giving them license to explore different interpretations.

    “We were just getting to excavate this text together, and I feel like there were just early conversations that we were having with each other, and also that I was having with Luca, where I feel like it was like we were getting permission, in a way, to, like, fill in the blanks where we needed to fill them in, and then where there needed to be space and ambiguity, or in moments with each other, to maybe find things that are more primal, we just got license to do that,” she said. “Being able to have that license to, I don’t know, sometimes, like, fool each other, fool ourselves, I think was really freeing.”

    And while Roberts wouldn’t reveal what she thought truly happened or if she even wanted to know that to play Alma, she did have an answer for what she thinks the film, which has been described as a #MeToo story and one about the world of academia, is truly about and it’s found in the film’s abundance of music.

    “There’s a song that plays in this film seven times … and it’s a song about forgiveness. And I think it says so much about these relationships and how Luca asked us to approach them and construct them and what he asked of us as artists to find and articulate in the characters we were portraying,” she said. “I think that he always felt that this beautiful story that [screenwriter] Nora [Garrett] wrote us was about love and forgiveness and trying to understand who we really are deep inside of ourselves and why we posture and do the things that we do.”

    Prior to the screening, Stuhlbarg and Garrett said they were welcoming the questions, conversations and opinions being shared after people saw the film.

    “I think everyone will see this film with their own particular lens,” Stuhlberg told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet ahead of After the Hunt‘s opening night screening. “I think it presents quandaries to an audience, and it’s up to them to decide what really happened, and I think it gets conversations going, and I’m delighted that those conversations seem to continue and they seem to be happening after every screening of the film. I’m just as curious to know what people are curious about and I’m looking forward to hearing what people have to say.”

    Garrett added, “We all did really hope that people would be able to bring their opinions to this and their ideas to this and you don’t get to pick and choose what type of opinions those are. I think as long as people feel very strongly, that’s welcome.”

    The first-time screenwriter told THR that while she had been thinking about the ideas and themes of the story for a while, it was the Alma character that really drew her in.

    Specifically, Garrett says, she saw the philosophy professor as “a woman who has such outward success but such inward self-denialism and if there was something that could cause that inward self-denialism to crumble a little bit or fracture a little bit, how that would change her life and how she would live her life.”

    And as for the “unreadable” elements of Alma, as THR‘s review of After the Hunt noted, Garrett said, “She has a lot of internal machinations and because she’s not looking fully at herself she’s also going to project something which confuses what you might believe to be her internal drive.”

    After the Hunt, from Amazon MGM Studios, is set to hit theaters in New York and L.A. on Oct. 10, expanding on Oct. 17. Brian Grazer, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum produced the film through Imagine’s first-look deal with Amazon MGM.

    The 2025 New York Film Festival runs through Oct. 13.

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    Hilary Lewis

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  • Ayo Edebiri Talks “Uncomfortable” Venice Interview: “A Very Human Moment”

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    Following an awkward interview moment at this month’s 82nd Venice International Film Festival that has gone viral on social media, Ayo Edebiri has apparently avoided the online discourse it sparked.

    The Golden Globe winner recently opened up about the “uncomfortable conversation” she had with an Italian journalist about the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements in Hollywood, noting that she “didn’t really pay too much attention” to the fan response.

    “I think I’m less online than I used to be,” she said at a New York Film Festival press conference on Friday, according to People. “So I didn’t really, to be completely honest — and I love to lie, I make money lying. But yeah, I didn’t really pay too much attention.”

    Edebiri added, “But, I mean, I think it was just a very human moment. And I think in a strange way, uncomfortable conversation, it’s kind of one of the many things our film is about. So shout out to tie-ins!”

    In Luca Guadagnino‘s After the Hunt, premiering Oct. 10 in theaters, college professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts) finds herself at a complicated crossroads when her prized pupil Maggie Price (Edebiri) accuses her colleague Henrik Gibson (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault, threatening to expose a dark secret from her own past.

    AFTER THE HUNT, from left: Ayo Edebiri, Julia Roberts, 2025. ph: Yannis Drakoulidis /© Amazon MGM Studios / Courtesy Everett Collection

    Despite being awkwardly excluded from a question by Italian journalist Federica Polidoro about what was “lost during the politically correct era” in Hollywood now that the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements supposedly “are done,” Edebiri clarified that the “work isn’t finished at all.”

    “Yeah, I know that that’s not for me, and I don’t know if it’s purposeful it’s not for me, but I just am curious,” said Edebiri after the ArtsLife TV reporter clarified her question was only for co-stars Roberts and Garfield during an interview promoting After the Hunt.

    One fan on X praised Edebiri for handling the moment “with poise and grace,” as another called out Polidoro for “being unprofessional.”

    Polidoro has since responded to the backlash, doubling down and defending herself against alleged online attacks. “I will not tolerate or accept defamatory or violent language, and I reserve the right to seek legal protection against those who, in recent days, have chosen to hide behind the digital mob to insult and attack me instead of seeking a civil and constructive discussion,” she wrote.

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    Glenn Garner

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  • Protect Ayo Edebiri at all costs after this bizarre interview | The Mary Sue

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    Sigh. I guess we have to do this. Okay, so by now, you’ve probably heard about the interview drama from the press tour for After the Hunt! The film stars Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, and Julia Roberts in a story about sexual assault and accusations in a campus environment. (If you can believe it, this is the less controversial of the topics surrounding the movie this week!)

    Anyway, ArtsLife TV attended the press junket this week and Italian journalist Federica Polidoro had a question about #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. Unfortunately for her, the deployment of this particular line of questioning was flawed at best. The journalist directed the comments towards Garfield (visibly uncomfortable) and Roberts (confused at how exactly we ended up here.) It was not a great moment in the history of the profession.

    For fairness, here’s what Polidoro asked: “Now that the #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter [movement] are done, what do we have to expect in Hollywood?”

    This is all after Roberts asked her to repeat the question. But, from our resident Amazing Spider-Man’s body contortions in the corner, the situation was already pretty darn awkward! Roberts backed up her co-star and Ayo Edebiri took the question anyway, as you would imagine she would.

    All you could see of her frustration was a quick laugh before launching into a thoughtful redirection of the question’s framing overall. Garfield tried to put a bow on it at the end, but that was a little bit rough for the journalist in this case.

    Well, it was rough, then it got worse once social media got rolling in here. A lot of folks were (read: Understandably!) upset at not only the question and insinuations there, but also the fact that the entire moment was guided by Polidoro to exclude Edebiri from commenting on anything she was stating with that line of questioning.

    Federica Polidoro responds to the Ayo Edibiri backlash

    On her social media, the journalist drew issue with all of social media making her the main character of the day for such a weird interaction. Her statement casts the people critical of her as “the real racists are those who see racism everywhere and seek to muzzle journalism, limiting freedom of analysis, critical thinking, and the plurality of perspectives.”

    About half of that is right? The part about freedom of analysis being limited seems spot-on, and critical thinking is in short supply all around the internet. But, a lot of people pointed out that she asked a question about racism and then got mad at people for having the temerity to critique her assumption that movements are “over” while excluding one of her interview subjects from answering. Especially when the person in question is Ayo Edebiri!

    It’s all a bit dizzy, and perfect fodder for the social media age. Instead of having a conversation about the very real issues in After the Hunt, here we sit debating this journalist’s line of questioning. Ask any interviewer, there are questions and moments that you want to have back. You know it almost immediately.

    Maybe Polidoro didn’t realize that was a little odd until her phone began levitating this weekend. But, it could be a useful moment of reflection as a journalist instead of calling anyone who questions your iffy line of questioning a “real racist.” Just another day in 2025, which is mercifully entering the last frames.

    (featured image: ArtsLife TV)

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    Aaron Perine

    Aaron Perine is a writer that covers Free Streaming TV, normal TV, small TV (the kind that plays on your phone mostly!), and even movies sometimes!

    Phase Hero co-host. Host of Free Space: The Free Streaming TV Podcast.

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    Aaron Perine

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  • Ayo Edebiri Says Me Too Movement and Black Lives Matter Aren’t ‘Done’

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    Photo: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

    Did you know they have anti-wokeness crusaders internationally? Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, and Julia Roberts shut down leading questions from a journalist on the Italian press tour for After the Hunt. A video posted by Italian site ArtsLife TV shows a reporter asking Garfield and Roberts what “to expect in Hollywood after the MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter are done.” Roberts, dumbfounded, asked a clarifying question. “Can you repeat that?” she asked. “And with your sunglasses on, I can’t tell which of us you’re talking to.” The reporter repeated that the question was for Garfield and Roberts — not Edebiri — and was what will Hollywood be like now that Me Too and Black Lives matter “are done” and “if we lost something with the politically correct era.”

    Edebiri then interjected. “I know that that’s not for me, and I don’t know if it’s purposeful if it’s not for me,” she said. “I don’t think it’s done, I don’t think it’s done at all. Hashtags might not be used as much but I do think that there’s work being done by activists, by people every day that’s beautiful, important work. That’s not finished, that’s really, really active for a reason because this world’s really charged. And that work isn’t finished at all.” Garfield backed her up, saying both “movements are still absolutely alive.”

    Edebiri added that media attention may skew people’s perception of what is or is not happening on the ground. “Maybe if there’s not mainstream coverage in the way that there might have been, daily headlines in the way that it might have been eight or so years ago, but I don’t think it means that the work is done. That’s what I would say.” That’s what she’d say if she was asked. But she wasn’t asked.

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    Bethy Squires

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