Before starring in Lurker, a thriller about the parasocial relationship between a rising pop star and a superfan, Archie Madekwe had a real-life lurker of his own. He was sitting in a coffee shop in LA one day, unaware that someone was watching him through the window. Alex Russell, the writer and first-time director behind the film, was sizing him up. “He just kind of watched me for a bit,” Madekwe tells me, now back in his native London. It was in this voyeuristic moment that he says the filmmaker was hit with the realisation: “I think he could play Oliver.”
Oliver is the mononym adopted by Madekwe’s charismatic British singer in the film, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with his entourage of hangers-on (“Trying to pass my friends off as professionals, man,” he laments in one early scene). A chance encounter brings him face to face with Matthew, played with reptilian precision by Théodore Pellerin, who poses as a casual acquaintance to ingratiate himself into Oliver’s orbit.
