Ayo Edebiri Says After The Hunt Is A “Rorschach Test” That Interrogates Your Discomfort

Just like its subject matter, After The Hunt is polarizing. The Luca Guadagnino-directed and Nora Garrett-written psychological thriller is being met with mixed reviews. In one camp, you have those who think the film (starring Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts), which wades into the treacherous waters of depicting the aftermath of a sexual assault on campus, is “sharp”, “well-calibrated” and “provocative” and in the other, you’ve got those who have written the film off as “wasted potential” full of “unlikeable characters.” The New Yorker called After The Hunt “a pleasurably ludicrous house of cards” while the New York Times pegged the film as “uncomfortable, for the wrong reasons.” The opposing responses are inevitable when you’re plunging headlong into a topic like #MeToo, a movement turned hashtag turned buzzword that stirs passionate defenses or ardent attacks at its mere mention, usually depending on your political leanings. There’s never going to be a general consensus on cancel culture, racism, sexism, and feminism, or overwhelming unity on how to approach the zeitgeist's most hotly-debated subjects. The inconsistency is the point. That’s not to say that After The Hunt doesn’t take a clear stance on these issues by its end — it does — but it deftly captures the push-and-pull (and cringe) of where these discussions have landed in the past five years, sometimes clumsily but with nuance, complexity, and self-awareness. 

And it’s in that audacity to let its waters stay murky, to allow its characters to be unreliable and unlikeable, and to live in the grey, where I think After The Hunt shines. Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a Yale professor whose star student, Maggie (Edebiri), accuses her colleague and best friend, Hank (Garfield), of sexual assault. From pretentious pseudo-intellectual debates over whisky to hard-to-watch faceoffs between two women from different generations and races who throw jabs about pronouns and intersectionality at each other to the unfairly messy politics of consent, After The Hunt dares to capture the frustration, hypocrisy and absurdity of the past five to six years (the movie is set from 2019-2025). It doesn’t deliver answers necessarily, but neither does that white dude in your Ethics 101 class — or your timeline — trying to debate you about your humanity. Mostly, these topics shouldn’t be up for debate at all. After The Hunt asks you to confront your own participation in making sexual assault a punchline and complicity in twisting the push for victims into fodder for the culture wars. The movie’s biggest flaw is that the racial dynamic between Maggie and Alma isn’t mined enough, but thanks to stellar performances by Roberts (her best in years) and Edebiri (consistently proving she’s a star), the gaps in the script are filled in with subtext and loaded stares. Throw in a live wire Garfield (he’s riveting and infuriating) and you’ve got a film that grabs hold and doesn’t let go until its final frame.

The week I saw After The Hunt was the same week news broke that Apple TV was shelving The Savant, a series in which Jessica Chastain plays an undercover investigator who infiltrates online hate groups to take down violent extremists, in the aftermath of the murder of right wing podcaster Charlie Kirk reportedly because its subject matter was too sensitive and too close to real life. To me, that’s exactly why that series should have been released. Chastain agreed. I’m tired of Hollywood’s fear of tackling relevant topics, I’m tired of films that don’t try to say anything at all. I’m tired of movies that seem built by an algorithm designed to garner the least backlash. At least After The Hunt has a backbone. Throughout the film, Guadagnino delivers a “borderline trollish act of homage” to famously “cancelled” Woody Allen, and it’s a rare, bold confrontation of the real-life controversies After The Hunt is trying to satirize. It was a big swing, and whether you like it or not, the film is an accurate snapshot of the #MeToo era. 

After The Hunt documents a moment in time — a disturbing, delicate, and awkward moment in time, one that we are still navigating. And for better or worse, shouldn’t we have art that reflects these times? Sometimes, I think I can tell when a movie is going to outlive its discourse. With time, After The Hunt may hold up as a page to be read in the chapter of this so-called cultural reckoning. Think of it as a sleek and uncomfortable time capsule of the past five years of #MeToo discourse, or as a character study of flawed intellectuals desperately attempting to perform their values while clinging to the facade of their respective identities. Or, as Edebiri told me, After The Hunt is a “Rorschach test” that interrogates your discomfort. 

Refinery29 spoke to Edebiri and her co-star Garfield over video chat during the film’s press junket in New York City and the duo discussed everything from their hesitation to play these parts, the psyches of their divisive characters, and the more lighthearted generational debates that dominate our timelines. Mild spoilers ahead.

Ayo Edebiri: Yes, definitely, definitely. But I think part of that was the reason that drew me to this [film] and interrogating within myself: what are my apprehensions? Why am I self censoring my thoughts about these conversations? It’s proof in a lot of these spaces that the reason why we're not done is because we don't want to touch certain areas — on all sides. So being able to then go here's this amazing, intentional, thoughtful, caring group of people and we all want to dig into this thing with each other. It was an honor to get to dive in.

Andrew Garfield: I do, and I think we’re in a moment in time right now where artists can feel fearful around what they're allowed to express or explore. And we're all looking to survive out here in this life. We want to make sure that our work gets sponsored and we rely on sponsorship. We rely on studios, on institutions, on people with paychecks to get projects made, to get our work into people's hearts, and that can be costly to our own integrity sometimes. And with this [film], it was like, Oh, we get to explore a very, very tender arena of subjects, and we get to really do it. And I’ve said this before, but when Luca told me that Ayo was gonna be playing this part, that reassured me a great deal, because not only is she a great actress, but she's someone who really considers these things in a very, very caring, sensitive position of humility and care. Obviously, this is a series of subjects that require that kind of care. 

AE: It's been interesting and honestly really cool listening to people who have watched the film, and sometimes more than once, saying how they felt the day they saw it, versus a week later, when you've had more time to marinate on it.

All of these characters have their own context, their own histories, their own baggage, that they're walking around with — however conscious or unconscious. And I think in the same vein, when you're a moviegoer, that's happening too. You're thinking like, Oh, here's what I'm gonna expect out of a Luca Guadagnino film, or out of a Julia Roberts performance. These are the characters. And this one is the Black girl. So this is what she's going to do in the story engine. We’re walking around with all these things. And you can watch the movie one way and get what you want out of it, or you can realize something is being subverted, both in the film and in yourself. I think it's like this really cool, tricky, layered Rorschach Test that Luca put together, and it's very intentional. 

The more that I watch the movie, or the more I sit with it, I'm like, Oh my God, there's this thing that I didn't notice, even though I was fully there. I think that act of conversation is what's really important to me. If we can, in this type of work and play, get to lead people to these conversations, that's pretty cool.

AE: What's interesting to me about Maggie is that I feel we have very different ethoses and in places I think there's discomfort. We've been talking a lot about the subconscious versus the conscious. I don't know if Maggie would describe herself as uncomfortable in that moment.

AE: I don't know if she would, to be honest, and that's its own very loaded thing. And I don't know how much she's aware of that, but it is operating outside of her. There's also a scene where she hugs Julia [playing Alma] and she looks up at a statue. That statue is one of Yale's founders. That man was a slave owner. The movie ends on the shot of money. Who is the President on the money? These sorts of things are just operating all the time underneath us, while we're also engaged in these person-to-person interactions day-to-day where we're maybe forgetting them or ignoring them. That's what I have to say about the Maggie of it all. 

As for advice, yes, I went to a PWI for college. That’s not an uncommon experience. I think finding your people, finding your safe space, whatever that looks like, and making space for connection and sanity — where you need it —  is important. I don't know if that's advice, but that's just what I would say.

AG: Yeah, I think he believes he is. He really does believe he's a good person. I think he feels victimized, and that's interesting. I just play it as it lays, you play it as it is. And he's someone that feels like he's worked very, very hard to get to where he's got to, that he's come from a less privileged background, even as a white male, and that he's had to put in extra hours, extra time, extra energy, and he thinks he's on the receiving end of an unfair kind of witch hunt. And it's a really fascinating place to experience, particularly as Hank in the sense of oh yeah, but there's no way that anyone else is going to see it like this. 

The isolation of it is really interesting. The loneliness is really interesting. And the comprehension of that loneliness, the awareness of, well, I'm fucked and there's nowhere to go. I think what's interesting mostly is the very brief moment that he gets to have of self reckoning at the end of his journey in the film where he maybe gets a glimpse of a part of himself that he had been trying to avoid throughout the story, a part of himself that is able to behave in ways that he would rather not look at. And I think that's in every scene, whether he knows it or not, that's in every single time we see him, that ability, that capacity, that entitlement.

AE: I'm not technically Gen Z. I'm technically a millennial! I’m literally turning 30. 
AG: And I’m a geriatric millennial. 
AE: Everyone kept calling me Gen Z. And Luca I kept being like, “Stop saying you're about to be 30. People need to think you're Gen Z.” And they do that to me and Rachel [Sennott]. They’re like ‘these girls, who you think are young, are actually turning so old? Can you believe [these girls] are about to die at the end of this year, because they're so old?’ [laughs] 

AE: Neither. Burn it all. 
AG: Neither, kill it! Burn it! 

AE: In between. 
AG: Let it be. Let everyone be what they want to be, man. I like being at home. 

AG: We need to have a foot in both worlds. 
AE: General strike! 
AG: We gotta survive.
AE: General strike! 
AG: But we also have our souls. 
AE: General strike!