UB Spotlight + Preview: ‘After The Hunt’ | Julia Roberts + Ayo Edebiri

“After The Hunt” opens in Theaters Limited October 10th and Expands October 17th via Amazon MGM Studios.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Nora Garrett.

In the thriller, a devastating campus accusation unleashes a torrent of public and personal chaos that blurs the truth of what really happened beyond recognition.

Secrets, deceptions, furies, and mixed agendas for the film’s five central characters soon collide in the morality tale that is After The Hunt.

And as the tension mounts, the film becomes an intentional provocation, a mirror on this modern moment, probing the dynamics of power, privilege, community—and how they interplay with a whole host of human frailties.

“After The Hunt” tells the blisteringly psychological story of gifted, unapologetically ambitious philosophy professor Alma Imhoff, who is in an all-out bid for the tenure she knows her work merits.

But when Alma’s prize student Maggie suddenly asks for help, levelling charges against Alma’s colleague and close friend Hank Gibson, it threatens to uncover Alma’s own long-buried private history.

Academy Award winner Julia Roberts is joined by Academy Award nominee Andrew Garfield, Emmy Award winner Ayo Edebiri, Academy Award nominee Chloë Sevigny, and SAG Award winner Michael Stuhlbarg creating an all-star cast each matched in craft and versatility.

Their intricate performances underline After The Hunt’s stark refusal to provide easy answers and instead barrel into the blurred, divided territory we all vividly recognize as the world we inhabit right now.

This visceral sense of life as we feel it is a touchstone quality of storytelling in the auteur vision of Luca Guadagnino. With his meticulous cinematic craft and love of hard questions, his audiences’ minds are often active long after the credits have rolled. For Guadagnino, the story of an elite campus in turmoil was a magnet precisely because it felt destined to ignite conversation—not just about which people in the story are telling the truth but how status, desires, and prejudices tint our views of reality.

Alma’s star pupil and admiring fan, Maggie Resnick, is just as complicated as Alma, a fiery young intellect who also happens to be the adopted daughter of one of the university’s largest donors.

Having experienced both vast privilege and unsettling bias, Maggie is hoping to live up to rumors that she is writing the best philosophy dissertation seen in years. But when she comes forward to tell the university a professor crossed the line in her apartment, everything about her is put up for question. Garrett notes that while Maggie is revered by other students for being Alma’s anointed favorite, she lives in fear that she’ll always be an outsider. “Maggie has not fully confronted yet the many feelings of otherness that come from being adopted into extreme inherited wealth,” says the screenwriter.

“And she also feels othered by the color of her skin. Yale was supposed to be her place of belonging, but it hasn’t been, so she glommed onto Alma as a kind of secondary mother figure.” But Alma breaks her heart. “There’s a huge disappointment I think a lot of women feel when you assume you’re going to find female champions in a place like this and then you don’t,” Garrett observes. “Part of Maggie’s arc is learning even with your mentor, power dynamics can be fraught.”

Having enjoyed Edebiri’s mix of raw honesty and comic chops in The Bear, Guadagnino had been hoping to work with her. “When I read Maggie’s description in the script, I instantly thought of Ayo,” he recalls. “I saw many beautiful actors read for the role, but I just couldn’t stop thinking of Ayo, so when she finally said yes, it was a great moment for the film.”

In turn, Edebiri says, “Speaking with Luca about Maggie is what cemented my desire to take the role, because the way he saw this world and these people was so rich and so complicated.” Adds Mandelbaum, “You feel from the moment Ayo is on screen that there’s a lot going on inside Maggie and you are desperate to find out what she knows and who she truly is. Ayo conveyed all that with the wit of someone playing 3D chess. I think she’s one of the most exciting young actors working today, and here we get to see her going to a new level of depth and emotion.”

Maggie’s knotted relationship to success, status, public image, and her own identity especially intrigued Edebiri. “Maggie feels at once very driven yet displaced,” she reflects. “She’s a transracial adoptee who has been set up to live a certain life and to achieve certain things. But she doesn’t yet fully know who she is or who she wants to be, and I believe that is why she fixates so hard on Alma. So many choices Maggie makes come from her desire to assume Alma’s alluring persona as her own.” Roberts watched Edebiri make that longing palpably real on set. “Ayo is so skilled, and her mind is so sharp, it was extraordinary to work with her. Her intelligence is matched only by her sense of humor. I loved the feistiness of these two generations of women confronting their differences.”

Edebiri kept her own close watch on how Roberts worked. “What impressed me most is how much Julia really cares about every single character and every actor,” she says. “And also, that she worked so hard but with the best attitude, always with that million-dollar smile no matter how intense the story.” Collaborating with Guadagnino was a further education. “He is a director who does nothing without purpose, from a painting in the background to a hand gesture he asks for. It all plays a part. It’s all connected. Nothing is careless. There is only endless curiosity,” she describes.

Produced by Brian Grazer, Luca Guadagnino, Jeb Brody, and Allan Mandelbaum.

Executive Producers; Karen Lunder, Justin Wilkes, Alice Dawson, and Nora Garrett.

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