After the Hunt’s Ayo Edeberi & Julia Roberts on queer infatuation and power dynamics

An early scene in After the Hunt sees promising PhD student Maggie pushing back against an assertion by cool, handsome professor Hank that for her generation, “offending someone” has “become the preeminent sin.” They’re seated casually around a parlor at the home of another professor, Alma, whose slightly oversized suit jacket Maggie has emulated in her look. It’s the first hint in Challengers and Queer director Luca Guadagnino’s latest film that Maggie, a queer woman, is overly attached to her mentor. Boundaries of admiration, sexual and romantic attraction, and obsession are obscured for Maggie.

“My friend and I used to have this joke that for straight people it’s like, f*ck, marry, kill. But for queer people, it’s like, f*ck befriend, or become. Just those feelings you’re sort of like, Where am I? And sometimes it literally could change in a day or all at once,” Ayo Edebiri, who plays Maggie, tells Out. “And so when I think of Maggie, she’s very much wanting all of it.”

Andrew Garfield as Hank and Julia Roberts as Alma in After the Hunt Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

Set in academia with a sexual assault allegation at its core, After the Hunt, from screenwriter Nora Garrett, serves up purposeful moral ambiguity around its characters. Julia Roberts’s Alma and her longtime friend and colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) are philosophy professors competing for tenure in Yale University’s hallowed halls. When Maggie approaches Alma with news that Hank “crossed the line” with her, Alma reluctantly sides with her student, not her friend, while failing to reckon with her personal views about what constitutes abuse of power. Alma’s world crumbles, and still, she clings to the idea of making tenure, something that may or may not skew her loyalty.

“I think power dynamics is sort of the key,” Oscar winner Roberts says.

“Alma has had this scratch-and-claw career. And now she’s at a place where she’s the duck on the pond where you don’t see the feet going [under water], and she just looks like it’s smooth sailing,” she adds. “I think for her, this sort of power dynamic between [Alma and Maggie], what goes on with Hank, all these things, these are the daily voices in her head that she pretends she has complete control over. So there’s a lot going on all the time with everybody in this.”

Ayo Edeberi, Julia Roberts, and Luca Guadagnino Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios / Credit: Yannis Drakoulidis

As Maggie, Edebiri, a star of queer projects like Bottoms and Theater Camp, plays a character who hails from wealth and is in a loving relationship with a law student, Alex, played by trans actor Lío Mehiel. Still, she’s a Black queer woman searching for identity in a rarified academic setting. Maggie’s desire to be with and to be Alma, and her subsequent disappointment in her mentor, fuel the plot.

“There’s a real pedestal that she puts Alma on that I don’t even think she realizes how high it is because Alma represents so many things,” Edebiri says. “Even though she is out and she is living at several intersections of just identity, I think there’s a lot that Maggie is suppressing and suppressing to herself, things she doesn’t even want to know but that are obviously broiling underneath. And so I think that sort of desire meeting all of this suppression just ends up being this really wild pressure cooker for a lot of fascinating choices.”

Watch the interview with Ayo Edebiri and Julia Roberts above.

After the Hunt is in select theaters on October 10 and in wide release on October 17.

This article originally appeared on Out: After the Hunt’s Ayo Edeberi & Julia Roberts on queer infatuation and power dynamics