The trailer for Andrew Haigh’s new queer romance, All of Us Strangers, has landed, giving fans a look at Irish actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott playing two neighbours who fall in love.
The film, based on the 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, stars Fleabag’s “Hot Priest” Scott as Adam a depressed screenwriter living in London, attempting to write a script inspired by his late parents. One night, his tower block neighbour Harry (Normal People breakout Mescal) returns home drunk and flirts with him.
Their meeting “punctures the rhythm of [Adam’s] everyday life,” according to the film’s official synopsis.
The trailer shows Adam return to his family home where he finds his decades-deceased parents, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, who appear to him alive.
“Is this real?” Adam asks his parents in one scene. “Does it feel real?” Foy’s character responds.
In another, Mescal’s Harry tells Adam: “It’s funny. It doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you did back then.”
“I’d always felt alone,” Adam says. “This is a new feeling.”
Following the film’s debut at Telluride Film Festival on 31 August, All of Us Strangers debuted with a perfect 100 per cent critics’ score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. It now stands at 94 per cent on the site.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Haigh said that his Irish stars Scott and Mescal had instant chemistry with one another.
“There was chemistry between the two of them literally the second I saw them together,” he told the publication.
Speaking of the film’s sex scenes, the director said: “Both of them were pretty fearless. There was no sense of them being afraid of approaching those scenes. They knew how important they were”.
Haigh was previously behind the 2011 queer indie film Weekend. He also served as a director and executive producer on HBO’s gay drama-comedy series Looking.
Haigh also explained that he was intent on casting a gay actor, such as Scott, in the role of Adam. However, he also clarified that he does not believe only gay actors should play gay characters.
“I’m not one of those people who thinks you have to cast a queer actor in a queer role, but for this role, I did want to because I was trying to unpick some nuances of a certain generation of gay people,” Haigh said.
He said of Scott: “I needed someone that could understand that and have those conversations with me. I didn’t want it to feel like I was trying to explain what it was like.”
Scott opened up about his sexuality in a 2013 interview with The Independent.
“Mercifully, these days people don’t see being gay as a character flaw. But nor is it a virtue, like kindness. Or a talent, like playing the banjo. It’s just a fact,” he said.
All of Us Strangers is scheduled for a theatrical release on 22 December in the US, and 26 January in the UK.
