Mescal and Buckley Reunite for Benh Zeitlin’s Outlaw Romance

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal clearly weren’t done with each other. Less than a year after sharing the screen in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet — which earned Buckley her Academy Award win — the two are reteaming for what may be one of the most anticipated films of the coming year. The project is Hold On To Your Angels, an outlaw romance set deep in South Louisiana, written and directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, the visionary behind Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Mescal plays a hell-bound outlaw. Buckley is a ferocious shepherd of lost souls. Together, they fall in catastrophic love as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under. Even just on paper, it sounds like the kind of film that gets people talking before a single frame is shot.

Zeitlin, who broke onto the scene with the magical realism of Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012 and followed it with Wendy in 2020, has been sitting with this story for a long time. Seventeen years, to be exact.

“Hold On To Your Angels is the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed — an outlaw romance for the end of America, set on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana,” Zeitlin said. “I’ve been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild seventeen years ago. It’s a love letter to an endangered way of life — and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.”

That’s a director who has been carrying a story around for nearly two decades. You feel it in every word.

A Dream Team Behind the Camera Too

The production muscle behind Hold On To Your Angels is just as noteworthy as the talent in front of the lens. Plan B — the company behind Moonlight and F1 — is producing alongside Alex Coco under his Rapt Film banner. Coco previously produced both Anora and Red Rocket, making him one of the sharper indie producers working right now.

“Benh Zeitlin absolutely stunned us and the world at large with the cosmic sorcery of Beasts Of The Southern Wild,” Plan B said in a statement. “With Hold On To Your Angels, Benh has set his powerful mix of intense realism, myth, and magic against the large scale of an epic love story. This is a writer/director with a vision for the ages and we could not be more proud to be by his side to make this film with Jessie and Paul.”

Coco echoed the sentiment, calling Zeitlin a filmmaker with “that rare gift: the ability to reveal profound beauty and humanity in parts of America that seldom find their way onto the silver screen.”

The Veterans is handling international sales, and CAA Media Finance is representing domestic distribution rights. The project is being introduced to buyers at this month’s Cannes Marché — which means the industry buzz around it is about to get very loud, very fast. Production is scheduled to kick off in February.

For Buckley, this is a remarkable moment. She arrives at this project as a newly minted Oscar winner, her Hamnet performance having finally delivered the Academy recognition that fans of her work in Wild Rose, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and The Lost Daughter always felt was inevitable. For Mescal, coming off his own Oscar nomination for Aftersun and the record-breaking success of Gladiator II, pairing back up with Buckley for something this intimate and ambitious feels like exactly the kind of swing you take when you’re at the top of your game.

A hell-bound outlaw and a shepherd of lost souls, falling apart together in the Louisiana bayou. Zeitlin’s been dreaming about it for seventeen years. We’re already counting down.