In director M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff star as a pair of men who must endure emotional and physical torture at the hands of fearsome assailants while facing the threat of the apocalypse.
The two actors hope, however, that audiences will look beyond the film’s supernatural premise, if extremely topical, to also notice the gay romance at its heart.
“Gay marriage wasn’t even legal when I came out in 2009, so it feels like the gift of a lifetime,” Groff told HuffPost. “We didn’t get lost during filming [how] blessed that we are on that wave of progress.
Released on Friday, “Knock at the Cabin” is an adaptation of a 2018 novel by Paul Tremblay called “The Cabin at the End of the World,” albeit with a radically different ending. The film focuses on married fathers Andrew (Aldridge) and Eric (Groff), who enjoy a vacation with their 7-year-old daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), at a country house near a secluded lake.
But the family’s idyllic getaway is interrupted when four strangers armed with improvised weapons emerge from a nearby forest to attack their property. Eric suffers a head injury in the ensuing scuffle, and the group takes him and Andrew hostage before presenting them with a terrible enema: a family member must willingly sacrifice his life to stop the end of the world.
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In flashbacks, it is revealed that Andrew was the victim of an anti-LGBTQ hate crime allegedly involving one of the home invaders, Redmond (Rupert Grint). Naturally, Andrew suspects that he and Eric are being targeted because of their sexuality, even as the apocalyptic claims of their captors seem to be starting to ring true.
While faithful to Tremblay’s book, the film’s use of homophobia and other queer-specific traumas as subtext proved divisive among critics. (Read HuffPost’s review of the film here.) However, Groff said Shyamalan’s intention was for him and Aldridge to “always feel the love” in the scenes, “even when there was confusion and even when there was pain.” .
“From the first reading of the script to the execution of it, I didn’t realize until we did how much love we were playing off each other outside the lines, including the jokes, of course,” he recalled. “But that was a real element that kept reminding us when we were making it.”
Meanwhile, Aldridge credited Cui, who is making her feature film debut, for keeping spirits high on set.
“We had a great time with Kristen in the midst of all the intensity,” she said of her young co-star. “She is determined and determined. [Shyamalan] he’s worked with so many child actors and can be incredibly tough and direct with them. But I think probably more than anyone else on the set, Kristen knew we were acting. It would make us laugh rather than the other way around. It was like he was doing his own version of taking care of us, really.
Aldridge, who came out as gay in 2020, has been open in interviews about concerns he previously had about how his sexuality might affect his Hollywood career.
Instead, he’s found even greater success of late, most notably in last year’s film adaptation of Michael Ausiello’s memoir, “Spoiler Alert,” in which he played a photographer named Kit Cowan whose relationship is put in jeopardy. game following a diagnosis of terminal cancer. .
Together, both projects gave Aldridge a chance to give audiences the kind of representation he felt was missing in his early years. “I could never have imagined when I left drama school that this would be a possibility,” she said. “I feel very grateful.”
Groff, meanwhile, was a queer crowd favorite on HBO’s “Looking,” which centered on the lives (and loves) of three gay men in San Francisco. His film career has also been thriving, with appearances in 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections and Disney’s Frozen, in which he voiced Kristoff.
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These days, she’s gearing up for a long-awaited return to the musical stage following her Tony-nominated roles in “Spring Awakening” and “Hamilton.” In September, she will appear opposite Daniel Radcliffe in the first Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, which recently completed a sold-out New York off-Broadway theater workshop.
Interestingly, Groff will always associate “Knock at the Cabin” with his role in “Merrily We Roll Along” as he began preparing for the musical on the set of the film in Pennsylvania.
“I was walking on the treadmill every morning at 5am before shooting and listening to ‘Merrily’. So they feel somehow intertwined even though they look so different,” she said. “But I don’t think the roles fit into any kind of canon. It’s just shooting an arrow, shooting it, and coming back for another.”
Check out a trailer for “Knock at the Cabin” below.
