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Julia Roberts teases emotional twists in ‘After the Hunt’ — here’s what we know so far

‘After the Hunt’ follows a PhD student accusing her professor of misconduct, with Julia Roberts playing a mentor caught between loyalty and justice

Julia Roberts is no stranger to thought-provoking roles, but her latest project may be one of her most layered yet. At the New York Film Festival on Friday night (September 26), the Oscar winner joined her co-stars Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, and Michael Stuhlbarg for the premiere of ‘After the Hunt.’ It’s director Luca Guadagnino’s latest psychological thriller that plunges audiences into academia, secrets, and the messiness of truth. The Amazon MGM Studios release centers on Maggie (Edebiri), a gifted PhD candidate who accuses her professor Hank (Garfield) of sexual misconduct.

Roberts plays Alma, Maggie’s mentor and Hank’s longtime friend, who finds herself torn between loyalty, justice, and her own buried doubts. Stuhlbarg rounds out the central triangle as Alma’s husband, a psychiatrist whose observations on human frailty echo through the film. While ‘After the Hunt’ does not provide easy answers, the cast made clear they embraced the uncertainty at the heart of the story. Garfield explained that playing Hank was an exercise in confronting uncomfortable dualities. “[It’s] fascinating to play with what’s conscious, what’s unconscious, in terms of what’s driving these people, what motives are hidden from ourselves,” he reflected.

Garfield added, “I think there’s quite beautiful moments of reckoning, self reckoning, self revelation, that each of our characters have in this film, and in those moments, it’s the kind of horrifying staring into the abyss of the kind of horrifying mirror that these characters are faced with at certain points,” as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter. Stuhlbarg described the movie as both mesmerizing and disorienting. “It feels like watching a slow-motion train wreck. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but you feel something’s coming,” he admitted.

He continued, “And that was kind of the experience, ambiguous, of playing it is that, you know, there’s many layers to this gorgeous text and to these extraordinary performers, and you kind of throw yourself into it to pull out what you think is going to be useful, and then you throw yourself into it and things happen.” For Edebiri, preparation was just as important as the chaos on set. She revealed that early rehearsals at Roberts’ home offered a safe space to explore every possible shade of the story. Roberts herself resisted pinning down definitive interpretations of Alma’s choices.

She argued that the ambiguity was not a flaw but a feature of the script by Nora Garrett. What she did highlight was the role of music in the film. “There’s a song that plays in this film seven times … and it’s a song about forgiveness,” Roberts noted. “I think that Luca always felt that this beautiful story that [screenwriter] Nora [Garrett] wrote us was about love and forgiveness and trying to understand who we really are deep inside of ourselves and why we posture and do the things that we do.” As per USA Today, ‘After the Hunt’ opens in New York and Los Angeles theaters on October 10 before expanding nationwide on October 17.