The film—only Zeitlin’s second after becoming an Oscar nominee for Wild, after the somewhat disappointing 2020 follow-up Wendy—will star Mescal as a “a hell-bound outlaw” and Buckley as “a ferocious shepherd of lost souls” who fall in “catastrophic love as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under”—which, yep, that’s definitely at Benh Zeitlin movie. (Now, somewhat inexplicably, with two Irish actors playing its Louisiana leads.) Produced by Plan B, the film hasn’t picked up a studio distributor yet; it’s expected to get shopped around at Cannes this year, where the prospect of hosting a Hamnet reunion is expected to garner plenty of Hollywood interest.
Zeitlin put out a statement alongside the news today, saying, “Hold On To Your Angels is the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed—an outlaw romance for the end of America, set on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana.” He also added, sans context, that, “I’ve been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild 17 years ago.” (Harper is a relatively unknown actor who appeared in both Beasts and Wendy; it’s not immediately clear what connection she has to Hold On To Your Angels.) Per Zeitlin: “It’s a love letter to an endangered way of life—and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.”
Buckley most recently starred in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, playing multiple roles; Mescal, meanwhile, is still on the hook for Richard Linklater’s Merrily We Roll Along, while not busy providing Paul duties on Sam Mendes’ bizarrely ambitious four-film Beatles biopics project.
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