Who is really telling the truth in After the Hunt? Its stars know, but their lips are sealed.
Luca Guadagnino‘s latest follows college professor Alma (played by Julia Roberts), who finds herself caught in the middle when her star student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses her close friend and colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual harassment. As the scandal tears through the Yale philosophy department and all three characters’ lives are impacted, the film never reveals if Hank is indeed guilty of the attack or if Maggie is lying, as he claims.
At the Los Angeles premiere on Saturday, Roberts walked the carpet alongside Michael Stuhlbarg (who plays her husband) and she confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that they do know what really happened between Edebiri and Garfield’s characters, as Stuhlbarg was quick to chime in, “But we’re not telling anybody.” Asked if that reveal came from Guadagnino or if they each had their own interpretation, Roberts teased, “We can’t tell you that!”
Writer Nora Garrett confirmed that when penning the script, she herself knew who was guilty and “I know that the actors do as well. I also know that all of those ideas may not be in concert with one another, but I think that was important for all of us to be able to craft our particular version of the piece.”
Producer Brian Grazer seems to be publicly taking a side, though, telling THR, “Before this project existed, I was very much in the anti-woke category, it just got too extreme. And this movie shows the damage of that by dealing with false accusations on the Yale campus, in this case, and what false accusations can do — they can and will destroy somebody’s life. And I just thought that was really, really important.”
Big reveals aside, Roberts said she was drawn to the film because of “Luca’s point of view of it and the idea of something that takes place in this micro-universe of this place and these people and the way Luca saw it and interpreted all of the layers of it, that’s what got me.”
Stuhlbarg, in his third collaboration with Guadagnino after Call Me By Your Name and Bones and All, noted, “It’s a very complicated script and could be taken as quite talky, but it’s just the background for some really interesting relationships between us [gesturing to Roberts] and some colleagues in school and what’s really going on and what we are privy to and what we’re not privy to. It’s a wonderful mix and he’s always got some interesting perspectives on stories like this.”
And although Guadagnino has said the project is not a #MeToo movie, Garrett said “it feels like it’s interacting with themes that have been in the cultural imaginary since #MeToo,” explaining, “the explosion of the way we talk about women’s narratives — especially in these highly codified, power-dynamic-ridden spaces and the power abuses that can be born from that — I think that’s going to be shaping the way we talk about instances like what’s portrayed in the film for years to come.”
After the Hunt hits theaters Oct. 10.