'All of Us Strangers' Director Stresses Importance of Gay Actor as His Lead

"All of Us Strangers" is becoming one of the most anticipated gay-led films of the year, and director Andrew Haigh is opening up about his thought process as the film prepares to hit theaters.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Haigh firstly says it was important for him to have a lead that was gay in real life.

Andrew Haigh says that when it came to casting for All of Us Strangers, his romantic fantasy inspired by Taichi Yamada's 1987 novel "Strangers," Haigh says he needed his main character to bring "nuance" in their performance.

Of course he settled on out actor Andrew Scott, with the talented Paul Mescal, Clair Foy and Jamie Bell in crucial supporting roles.

"Andrew I'd liked for a long time, and I felt like this was kind of a perfect role for him," Haigh explained during a post-screening discussion at the New York Film Festival on Sunday. "And I'm not one of those people that say you have to be queer to play queer roles, but it was important to me in this case. Because there's so much nuance that I was trying to get to, I didn't want to have an endless conversation with somebody who's trying to understand it."

Haigh also discussed shooting the film in his childhood home, capturing intimate scenes, and his approach to casting his lead first.

"Anybody that knows me would know that [the film] is pretty personal. For example, I shot the film in my old childhood home, so the house was my old house, and I hadn't been back there for 45 years," said Haigh, which was the first house his family lived in and is located just outside of London. "When I wrote the script, I had that house in mind, and then I went back there, went to the door and they said, 'Yeah, OK you can film here.'"

"All of Us" follows a gay man in London who has a chance encounter with his neighbor while he is in the middle of reconciling his past. It's a mysterious and meaty story that Haigh made sure his cast was prepared to take on. That included filming the sex scenes, too.

"We actually spoke a lot with the actors about how we wanted it to feel," he said. "I wanted it to feel real and tender and delicate, and a bit sexy and a bit dirty sometimes – all of those things that sex is."

Look for "All of Us Strangers" in theaters December 2023.