Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott have no shortage of chemistry together in the trailer for the movie All of Us Strangers.
In the upcoming film — which is based on Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers — Scott, 46, plays Adam, a writer revisiting the loss of his parents as a child. Along the way, he strikes up a romance with his neighbor, Harry (Mescal, 27).
The official trailer was released by Searchlight Pictures on Thursday, September 21 — and not only reveals more plot details but gives a further glimpse into the intense romance between Mescal and Scott’s characters.
The two-and-a-half-minute trailer includes a montage of love scenes as well as Adam returning to his childhood home to find that his parents are alive and frozen in time at the ages they were when they passed away. As he grapples with this revelation, he and Harry’s romance deepens.
“There was chemistry between the two of them literally the second I saw them together,” director Andrew Haigh said of Scott and Mescal in an August interview with Vanity Fair. “And in terms of the sex scenes: “Both of them were pretty fearless. There was no sense of them being afraid of approaching those scenes. They knew how important they were.”
He continued, “I’ve been more objective in how I’ve shot sex scenes in the past. Here, I really wanted to feel the subjective nature of having sex and what it feels like — the nervousness and the excitement and the physical sensation of being touched by someone else and what that does to you.”
When it comes to the discourse questioning whether straight actors should play gay roles, Haigh, who is gay, told Vanity Fair he was mostly concerned with casting a gay actor in the role of Adam.
“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,” he said of Scott, who has spoken openly about being queer.
Haigh continued, “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.”
Mescal, for his part, dated Phoebe Bridgers from 2020 to late 2022.
All of Us Strangers will be released on December 22.3. Watch the full trailer here.
