Julia Roberts has a special place in her heart for costar Andrew Garfield.
When asked about her reaction to Garfield, 42, calling her a “national treasure,” Roberts, 57, gushed, “Andrew is so incredible.”
“I have never known a human who’s so deeply profound,” she said on Sunday, September 28, at After the Hunt’s New York Film Festival. “Profoundly introspective. He is a searcher. He is a seeker. It is so beautiful to listen to him, pontificate on life and people and our needs and our hearts, and he’s pretty breathtaking.”
Roberts noted that Garfield “holds a really special place in my world,” adding, “It’s very touching.”
“He says things, I think he says them to make me uncomfortable,” she said. “He knows exactly where my little tender parts are, so he just kind of likes to do that, it was very sweet of him. To speak like that. Yes, very touching.”
The duo are set to star in After the Hunt, which follows PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) as she accuses professor Hank (Garfield) of sexual misconduct. Roberts plays Maggie’s mentor Alma, a close friend and colleague of Hank.
While discussing the film’s ambiguity, Garfield noted at the Friday, September 26, premiere that 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.”
“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,” he said.
Garfield continued, “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.”
Edebiri, for her part, shared that a rehearsal period at Roberts’ house helped the actors explore the story line.
“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 [director] Luca [Guadagnino], 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.”
After the Hunt hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles on October 10, expanding nationwide on October 17.
