When Andrew Haigh was shooting his new film, All of Us Strangers, in his parents’ old house in Croydon, something strange began to happen. “I started getting eczema again, and I’d not had eczema since I was a kid,” says the director, who is now 50. “It was coming up in the exact same places. I thought, ‘What the fuck is happening to me?’ I feel there is a sense that your body remembers trauma. Somehow things get almost embedded in your DNA, and they find ways to leak out.”
In All of Us Strangers, this leakage happens to Adam, a 46-year-old gay man exquisitely played by Andrew Scott. He’s a blocked, depressed screenwriter whose parents died in a car crash when he was 12, and who lives in a mysteriously empty tower block in London. One night after a fire alarm, a younger man called Harry, played by Paul Mescal, drunkenly comes to his door. Although Adam initially rejects him, the pair later embark on the love affair he has always yearned for – and Mescal and Scott are explosively convincing as a couple. “Casting is like running a dating agency,” says Haigh. “I have to be careful to pick the people who will be good together.” When Adam decides to return to the house he grew up in, he discovers that his mum and dad – played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy – are still living there, the same age they were when they died, in a perpetual 1987.
