Pedro Pascal had a strong message about the current political chaos in the U.S. at the Cannes press conference for Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” telling journalists: “Fuck the people who try to make you scared.”
When the cast — also including Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Austin Butler — was asked if they were worried about reentering the U.S. after making a film with such a strong political message, Pascal answered: “Fear is the way that they win.”
“So keep telling the stories, keep expressing yourself and keep fighting to be who you are,” he continued. “Fuck the people that try to make you scared, you know? And fight back. This is the perfect way to do so in telling stories. And don’t let them win.”
“Eddington” premiered last night to a five-minute standing ovation, during which Phoenix got visibly emotional. The A24 film — which doesn’t shy away from skewering the MAGA movement — is set at the height of the COVID pandemic in May 2020 and follows “a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Phoenix) and mayor (Pascal)” that “sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.” Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward and Clifton Collins Jr. round out the cast.
Earlier in the press conference, Pascal was also asked about Trump’s immigration policies and got candid about the responsibility he feels when speaking on such a topic.
“Obviously, it’s very scary for an actor participating in a movie to sort of speak to issues like this. It’s far too intimidating the question for me to really address, I’m not informed enough,” he said. “I want people to be safe and to be protected, and I want very much to live on the right of history. I’m an immigrant. My parents are refugees from Chile. We fled a dictatorship, and I was privileged enough to grow up in the U.S. after asylum in Denmark. If it weren’t for that, I don’t know what would have happened to us. I stand by those protections. I’m too afraid of your question, I hardly remember what it was.”
Speaking about his inspiration for “Eddington,” Aster said he wrote the film “in a state of fear and anxiety about the world.”
“I wanted to show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore,” he said. “Over the last 20 years, we’ve fallen into this age of hyper-individualism. That social force that used to be central in liberal mass democracies — and agreed upon vision of the world — that is gone now. COVID felt like the moment where that link was finally cut for good. I wanted to make a film about what America feels like, to me. I’m very worried.”
Pascal said the themes in the script resonated so heavily with him when he read it that he “had to be part of” it. “It felt like the first time that we had a mole, like a whistleblower almost, someone from the inside being like, ‘This is what’s happening,’” he added. “And that was really powerful to me, and I don’t think I understood that until I saw it.”
Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman praised “Eddington” in his review, calling the film a “brazenly provocative Western thriller” that sets out to “capture the creeping unreality of what America’s become.”
“‘Eddington,’ while not a comedy, showcases an angry, sinister, and maybe crazy new America that it views with a deadpan tone of trepidatious glee. And the movie presents us with a fully scaled vision of that transformed society,” Gleiberman continues. “As Aster presents it, what happened to America is about COVID and everything the relentless rules of the pandemic did to us.”
