Acclaimed A24 horror maestro Ari Aster is back for his third feature film, “Beau Is Afraid.”
Following the jaw-dropping successes of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” writer-director Aster announced his upcoming collaboration with Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix in February 2021. “Beau Is Afraid” is billed as an “intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time,” with Phoenix playing the titular Beau.
Aster teased that the feature will be a “nightmare comedy” that had to be tampered down from an original four-hours-long script.
The writer-director helmed a 2011 short film also titled “Beau,” although it is unclear if “Beau Is Afraid” is related to the short. In that short film, a neurotic middle-aged man’s trip to visit his mother is held up when his keys are mysteriously taken from his door. He is subsequently haunted by an increasingly sinister chain of upsetting events.
As Aster previously told IndieWire, the feature is decidedly not a horror film. “It might take me a few movies before I wind back around to [horror], but I love horror and I’m sure I’ll be back,” Aster said. Yet he added one caveat: “Head trauma will ALWAYS have a place in my films.”
Keep scrolling to learn all the details about Aster’s elusive “Beau Is Afraid” ahead of the film’s April 21 release date.
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Joaquin Phoenix Is Unrecognizable as an Aging Beau
Image Credit: A24 Oscar winner Phoenix portrays the title character Beau who is taken hostage after being involved in an accident. The official synopsis reads: A paranoid man embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother in this bold and ingeniously depraved new film from writer/director Ari Aster.
The trailer for the film shows Phoenix in all stages of life as Beau.
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Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, and More Round Out the A-List Cast
Image Credit: A24 Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Patti LuPone, and Parker Posey comprise the star-studded “Beau Is Afraid” cast, with it still unclear who has the best interests in mind for Phoenix’s Beau.
Hayley Squires, Denis Ménochet, Kylie Rogers, Armen Nahapetian, and Zoe Lister-Jones additionally star.
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“Beau Is Afraid” Was Originally Titled “Disappointment Blvd”
Image Credit: A24 Beau is most afraid of broken dreams, as the original title of the film “Disappointment Blvd” seemed to prove. The new title of “Beau Is Afraid” was unveiled in December 2022 upon the first look at the feature.
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Joaquin Phoenix and Ari Aster Worked Together “Like Old Friends”
Image Credit: A24 Stephen McKinley Henderson revealed of co-star Phoenix that the actor was completely “simpatico” with writer-director Aster.
“[Joaquin] and Ari were so simpatico, and they worked together for the whole film,” Henderson said. “I came in pretty close to the end of the shoot and so they had been working a while. And their way of working together was like they were really old friends. They could get upset and make up in the span of seconds, it seemed. But the work was always the better for it.”
Production wrapped in October 2021.
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