“The house we shot at burned down in the Altadena fires,” says writer-director Alex Russell, whose feature debut, Lurker, arrives in theaters today. “I guess we did capture something about L.A., and I’m glad we, weirdly, memorialized it.”
Starring a jittery Théodore Pellerin (Never Rarely Sometimes Always) and a radiant Archie Madekwe (Saltburn), Lurker is a pulsing exploration of the relationship between celebrity and viewer, an intriguing parasocial psychodrama with shades of All About Eve and Mean Girls.
Madekwe plays Oliver, a pop musician whose star is on the rise when he stumbles into the streetwear store where Pellerin’s Matty works. When Matty just happens to put on Oliver’s favorite song, their hypebeast meetcute seems like a sign, and Matty quickly works his way into the pop star’s inner circle of homies-turned-associates.
Lurker is a canny exploration of homosocial tensions in L.A.’s cutthroat music scene. Soundtracked by all-star producer Kenneth Blume, better known as Kenny Beats, it’s one of the slyest, most electrifying movies of the year.
Rounding out the cast are Zack Fox (Abbott Elementary), Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms), Wale Onayemi, Daniel Zolghadri (Eighth Grade), and Sunny Suljic (Mid90s).
Russell is a former music journalist who has since worked on two of the most acclaimed shows of the 2020s, Beef and The Bear. The season two episode he wrote for the latter, “Forks,” earned him a WGA award and was the episode that actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Fantastic Four) submitted to support his nomination, and eventual win, for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy.
Russell wrote Lurker during the early days of Covid. It took a while to make the movie — Lurker almost went into production in 2021 but didn’t get off the ground until 2023.
“Théodore Pellerin was always attached.” Russell tells Movie Maker. “I was a little afraid of him aging out of the world.”
There were a few changes made to the script along the way. While some of them were due to constraints of production, they ended up enhancing the central themes of Russell’s original script.
“Originally, I had more fashion shows, parties, scene-y things that filled out their day-to-day,” he says.
But as the locations consolidated, the movie became more about Oliver’s intimate world. It only helps raise the stakes.
“It means a lot more to someone like Matthew to be sitting in Oliver’s bed than to be out in the world with him.” Russell says.
Many of Lurker’s funniest moments come courtesy of rapper and comedian Zack Fox (Abbott Elementary).
“Zack and I are best friends.” Russell tells Movie Maker. “We’ve known each other for over ten years.”
Russell has directed some of Fox’s music videos, but, Russell explains, “at the time, he wasn’t really an actor. It would have been more of a jump for me to cast him because I knew that he could do something like this, but the role wasn’t originally written for him. And then somehow, once I was done with the script, I realized he was perfect for it.”
As with Pellerin, Fox’s age was an initial concern that actually became an asset. As a longtime music journalist, Russell has met plenty of variations of the characters he writes about in Lurker. “Fox’s character became the slightly older guy who’s weirdly still around — that’s a dynamic in itself,” Russell says.
Russell, who also directed videos for hip-hop group Brockhampton, wanted the cast to feel real to the L.A. music scene. “We just wanted the ensemble to be realistic. We didn’t want college brochure casting, we wanted it to feel like a hodge-podge L.A. group.”
One of those dynamics is that Matty and Jamie are two white outsiders who join Oliver’s tight-knit multiracial crew. While Russell was certainly aware of that tension, it wasn’t central to the script.
“The script was written for the parts to be open to anyone. It wasn’t racially specific,” Russell says. “This configuration worked in the case of this movie, but there could’ve been a version where Ollie and Matty were two white boys. I wanted to stay open to any casting as it came together — Ollie was originally written as an American, but once I started talking to Archie, it made sense if the character was British and a transplant to L.A.”
A major part of this configuration is Havana Rose Liu’s character, Shai. The only girl in the group, she takes her role as music manager seriously. Liu prepared for the role with similar diligence, and shadowed music managers to get into Shai’s mindset.
“I cast based on auditions, obviously, but also in how the actors talked about the role,” Russell explains. “The balance to find with Shai was how her opinion on Matty evolves as the movie progresses. She’s somewhat protective of him at first. She knows that he’s not totally naïve, but she also has sympathy for anyone who gets swept up in Oliver’s world. When Matty reveals more of himself, she realizes she was protecting the wrong side. Havana got that immediately.”
Alex Russell on Imposter Syndrome in Lurker
Russell was coy when asked if he thinks Matthew has real talent. Throughout Lurker, Matty struggles with accurate feelings of being an imposter— even as he fails to articulate exactly what his role is in Oliver’s crew.
“I’d love to leave the question of Matty’s talents up to the audience. I do think the movie asks about the idea of faking it ‘til you make it. Because Matty is very disciplined; he figures out Premiere and then suddenly is shooting music videos.”
Though we don’t see social media in the film, we’re constantly hearing about Oliver’s posts and pictures from fans invested in the relationship between Oliver and Matty. That feedback is how Matty (and the audience) can measure how well he’s integrated into the crew.
One might expect a cooler response from Russell about Matty’s seemingly compulsive need for attention, but he was forgiving.
“He’s passionate about impressing and maintaining proximity to Oliver. Oliver is the battery in Matty’s back that makes him figure out whatever skill he needs to develop.” Russell says. “I think so much of why anyone gets good at anything is the desire for attention.”
Given that Matty starts the movie in a trendy streetwear boutique on Melrose Avenue, fashion understandably plays a huge part in Lurker. “You’ll see designer sweatpants on the floor,” Russell points out. The actors’ style pedigrees also played a large part in how each character’s fashion was shaped.
“A lot of the actors also model or have some background interest in fashion, so they were able to imbue the characters with a little bit of their own style.”
Major storytelling happens in the costumes, which were expertly designed by Megan Gray — keep an eye out for an early, revealing glimpse of the fan t-shirts that line Matty’s closet. In keeping with Matty’s character, Gray built a wardrobe entirely thrifted in L.A. with garments from cool but accessible brands: Vans, Dickies, Stüssy, Levi’s, Lacoste, and Carhartt.
For Oliver, Gray looked to her longtime relationship with Loewe for several of the movie’s most emotive moments. (Madekwe has also worked extensively with the designer brand). Oliver sports a show-stopping sinkhole coat during a contentious album cover shoot, and a vibrant, Peter Pan-ish wool sweater when he expresses a desire to make his own family.
Fans of Russell’s work on The Bear and Beef won’t be surprised that Lurker has a brief, but perfectly sculpted crash out.
“It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie.” Russell says. “It’s still funny to me. The music is so overpowering, it’s exactly how it feels in his head, even though the texts he’s sending are innocuous.”
As in many scenes in the movie, Russell relies on Pellerin’s subtle, but effective, expressions of desperation. “I didn’t have to talk to Theo that much about that scene. Any time there was a silent expression, he just would nail it. It was always perfect.”
Developing the scene was “an exercise in kinetic energy,” as Russell puts it. After multiple takes in the car, they did separate inserts of just the phone in the studio to get closer and closer to the screen.
“How can we represent what it feels like when a texting bubble shows up?” Russell explains. “We just kept punching in closer and closer. We needed the texts to feel like an earthquake.”
No spoilers here, but the ending was a surprise even to Russell.
“I knew that would be the last scene, but on the page, it was a lot longer. … But early in the edit, I realized it would be much better to end it sooner. If I’d known that was the plan, I wouldn’t have captured that moment right before we cut.
“Once I found the ending, I thought we had half the movie. An ending is 90% of a movie. It’s what makes it very different from television. You can get away with almost anything in the first half of a film and if the second half accelerates, well, people will forgive it.”
Lurker arrives in theaters August 22, from MUBI.