Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott find love—and ghosts—in the haunting trailer for the upcoming film All of Us Strangers, below. Helmed by Andrew Haigh, previously known for 2011’s gay romance drama Weekend and the 2017 coming-of-age film Lean on Pete, All of Us Strangers is a meditation on grief, love and the enduring power of memory.
Who is in the All of Us Strangers cast?
Irish actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott lead the cast as a pair of neighbors who fall in love, with Mescal playing the enigmatic Harry and Scott playing a 40-something writer named Adam. Claire Foy (Women Talking) and Jamie Bell (who rose to fame in 2000 playing the titular boxer-turned-ballet dancer, Billy Elliot) play Adam’s three-decades-deceased parents, who are now seemingly alive.
The 46-year-old Scott is perhaps best known for his turn as the “Hot Priest” in Phoebe Waller-Bridges’ Fleabag; 27-year-old Mescal has had a banner few years, starting with his breakout as the moody jock Connell in Hulu’s Normal People. No stranger to brooding roles, Mescal received a Best Actor Oscar nod for his turn as a depressed young father in 2022’s Aftersun.
What is the All of Us Strangers plot?
All of Us Strangers is an adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 Japanese psychological novel Strangers. In the film, Adam (Scott) is a 40-something writer living alone in a nearly deserted high-rise out of London. His neighbor, Harry (Mescal), drunkenly flirts with him one night, and the two embark on a steamy, tender relationship. At the same time, Adam finds himself drawn back into the past—specifically, the house where he grew up. He returns there and finds his parents (Foy and Bell), who died tragically when he was a child, somehow still alive.
Despite the premise, the ghost story is not so much a science fiction or fantasy film as a meditation on how memory functions as an interwoven facet of our lives. Through his interactions with his parents, adult Adam is able to heal some of child Adam’s wounds, including coming out to his parents as gay and reflecting on the difficulties of growing up closeted in the 1980s.
It’s something director Andrew Haigh is familiar with, as a 40-something gay man himself. While the film isn’t autobiographical (his parents are alive, for one), he did use his own childhood home as the filming location, a surrealist, meta touch that adds an extra layer of intimacy and depth to the story. When it came to casting Scott, who is gay, as Adam, Haigh told Vanity Fair, “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. 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.”
As for the several sex scenes between Scott and Mescal, Haigh said, “There was chemistry between the two of them literally the second I saw them together. Both of them were pretty fearless. There was no sense of them being afraid of approaching those scenes. They knew how important they were.”
Is there a trailer for All of Us Strangers?
The first trailer for All of Us Strangers dropped September 21. In the clip, Mescal and Scott fall in love, go to the gay club and find deep intimacy with each other as Scott sets out to reconnect with his deceased parents. Watch below:
When is the All of Us Strangers release date?
All of Us Strangers hits theaters December 22, after a premiere at the New York Film Festival.