Interview: Kieron Moore on ‘Blue Film’
It’s hard to believe that Blue Film is Kieron Moore‘s very first role in a feature film.
The debut feature from Elliot Tuttle, which bowed in competition at the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival, unfolds entirely within the confines of a Los Angeles Airbnb. Inside that claustrophobic space, camboy Aaron Eagle (Moore) meets Hank (Reed Birney), a stranger who’s paid for his company. What starts as a simple transaction quickly unravels into something darker, as it’s soon revealed that Hank is Aaron’s former history teacher, forcing both men to confront a buried connection and a past they thought they had left behind.
Alongside Birney, Moore is in almost every scene, every frame of Blue Film, and he proves that he is more than capable of carrying a film, turning in a soulful, incredibly nuanced performance that will undoubtedly cement his status as one of the brightest new stars in the industry. The role of Aaron Eagle is a heavy one, requiring the actor to go into deep, dark places, and he does so with gusto, completely throwing himself into the character and surfacing with what is simply one of the best performances of the year in the process.
Moore says the project first came on his radar through his manager, who sent him the script after he voiced his desire to be in “dangerous” projects. “Saltburn had just come out and a lot of my friends were messaging me being like, ‘Oh, you should have been in that,'” Moore recalls. “And then I texted my manager and said, ‘If anything dangerous comes up, I’d really like to push my limits.’ Two weeks later he sent me Elliot’s script. They said it was extremely dangerous, not a lot of people would say yes. But I read it once, and then I read it again, and I couldn’t stop. I’d never had that happen before. I just knew I had to do it.”
From there, things moved quickly. “We did a Zoom chemistry read with Reed, and it was arguably the best chemistry read I’ve ever had,” he explains. “Reed was such a massive fan of me straight away, which was really nice. He literally said, ‘You should do this movie. I can’t imagine doing it without you.’ I knew I didn’t want to see anyone else play Aaron Eagle. That was it.”
That dynamic forms the backbone of Blue Film, a chamber-piece set in one location that consists mostly of conversations between two people. As Hank and Aaron engage in a twisted war of words, dissecting everything from religion to sexuality to the topic of nature vs. nature, Reed and Moore light up the screen with their chemistry, bringing some much needed electricity and momentum to a film that could have very easily been more cold and clinical in any other actors’ hands. “Reed is a powerhouse,” gushes Moore. “Anything he does has such intention, it’s hard to put armor up against him. When you’re with someone that’s got that caliber, you’re like, I’m here to learn. I want the movie to do well and I want to be the best I can be in it. How am I going to do that? ‘Oh I know, just hold Reed’s hand and let him show me the way.'”
Their bond went beyond just the work. “I fell in love with Reed,” he says. “It’s impossible not to. He’s one of the most specific human beings I’ve ever met, immensely talented, and he became one of my best friends. I speak to him more than anyone. He’s given me so much guidance in my career, but also just as a human being — he teaches me to slow down. On set, that was different, of course. You have to fight him back, you can’t just let him have the ground. I think that gave him a fire too. But there’s no shadow of a doubt that I couldn’t have done what I did without Reed. He forms my Aaron Eagle, he forms my Alex, as much as Elliot did.”
“I think you can see that in the movie,” he adds. “I think it’s a love story. There’s love in it. There’s genuine love and however you want to see that, if that makes you feel whatever it makes you feel. Forget sympathy. At the core of the story is love, witnessing someone’s existence and wanting to love them.”
As Aaron, Moore is loud, brash and bold, the absolute picture of confidence as he imposes himself on both Hank and the audience, flexing his muscles (both literally and figuratively) and going on mouthy, lengthy monologues about religion and BDSM dynamics, using his sexuality as currency (again, both literally and figuratively) in order to get by in life.
But as Alex, the real person behind the Aaron Eagle persona that we soon come to found out has been carefully designed as a shield, Moore displays an entirely different side of himself as an actor. It’s brilliantly well-constructed performance, with every glance hinting at unspoken trials. Every line delivery alluding to long-buried tribulations. But it’s also incredibly natural as well. There’s no trace of artifice in Moore’s performance; he has the on-screen presence of an actor with decades of experience and and a quiet confidence that suggests he’s only just beginning to tap into the depths of what he can do.
“I always asked myself, can I convince people that there’s still a little boy in him?” says Moore of his approach to the character. “Me and Elliot talked about this so much on set — where does Alex come out, if at all? Sometimes Elliot would tell me, just do it again and don’t push, let’s see if it happens naturally.”
As Aaron, Moore is equal parts fierce, terrifying, and magnetic, bringing a raw physicality and unpredictable charge to the role that makes it impossible to look away. But as Alex, he strips all of that away, revealing someone thoughtful, vulnerable, almost fragile. It’s a tightrope walk of a performance, and in lesser hands, the shift might have felt jarring, but Moore threads it into a single performance, beginning as a wildly unrestrained display of machismo and bravado that slowly curdles into a haunting, blistering portrayal of unprocessed grief and trauma.
“Aaron spends his whole life being watched,” explains Moore. “Then he goes to this house and it’s like the first time he’s been seen. And Hank is telling him, ‘No, I saw you then.’ It’s hard to keep the walls up after that. By the end you get to decide: does Aaron find his way back to Alex, or does he go back to Aaron Eagle because that’s where he feels more secure? It’s quite sad, really. Both of them are scarred men.”
Throughout the course of the film, Hank is continuously filming Alex. Filming him as he engages in a highly propulsive monologue, filming him as they both engage in tense, terse conversations, even filming him when they engage in something much more intimate. “Memories are the only things you get to keep,” says Hank at one point. Tuttle’s approach to memory and shame weighed heavily on Moore, who allowed it to inform his performance as both the shameless Aaron and the shameful Alex, two opposite sides of the same coin.
“I think Aaron spent the majority of his adult life trying to disregard all memory,” he explains. “Everything Hank says in the script is so piercing, he doesn’t let Aaron get away with it. You realize there are wounds inside us all that we plaster over, riddled in shame, in the name of feeling healthier. These things that we’ve permitted ourselves to be excused of, and they’re quite terrible things, you know? It’s this idea of, who are we? What do we want to be? I think what was really interesting about Aaron and Alex specifically is, who does he want to be?”
It’s an incredibly challenging role for any actor to take on, let alone one that is making his film debut. But it’s also an incredibly challenging film as well, one that explores topics and subjects that are rarely explored in film, and for good reason. Not every filmmaker has the skills needed to dissect a subject matter this sensitive, especially in today’s social and political climate. But Tuttle certainly does, approaching the film’s themes as carefully and as cautiously as possible. But he also has Moore and Birney, each tackling their characters with care and nuance. And, more importantly, inhabiting their characters without any judgment, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions and form their own opinions instead.
Was Moore ever afraid to take it on? “Yes and no,” he admits. “Everyone has that first thought of, oh my god, people are going to watch this and what are they going to think of me? But then you ask yourself, what do you want to be? If I wanted to play myself, I’d do reality TV. I don’t want to play Kieron. I do that every single day. I want to play characters that push me. And Aaron is deeply complex, deeply intelligent, and layered. So yes, it scared me — and that’s exactly why I had to do it. I’ve grown as a person by doing the role.”
“I’m deeply moved by the movie itself, but that’s all Hank,” he continues. “I get the luxury of playing the audience. I get to ask these questions that people may be too scared to ask, but also maybe want to ask, but you just don’t know how to. You’re in a conversation, you’re kind of like, ‘I wanna leave, but I’m so deeply interested.’ It’s kind of like that, and I think that’s fascination, isn’t it? Wanting to understand, it’s almost like a pissing contest. Aaron thinks he’s the baddest man on the planet. He thinks he’s this bad, beastly person. ‘I’m the worst that can be.’ But then Hank comes in like, ‘No, this is the worst you can be,’ wrapped up in this generous, compassionate, person who is riddled with hated for himself.”
Moore did his homework too, immersing himself in literature and art that would help him understand the film and its characters before he even booked the role. “There’s a great book I read called Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us [by Jesse Bering],” he says. “It goes into how our adolescent years form our kinks, and how society has shifted over the years. I was fascinated by it. This stuff exists — it’s not fantasy. It’s real, and it deserves to be interrogated. That’s what I want from films I make: to challenge you, to make you sit there and go, why do I feel this way? What is it bringing up in me? And at the end of the day, if you hate me after it, that’s fine. At least you had an opinion. The worst thing would be to feel nothing.”
With roles in the popular teen series Vampire Academy and his critically acclaimed turn in the BBC drama Code of Silence, Moore could have easily charted a path as another young, up-and-coming actor destined for safe stardom. But he very clearly isn’t interested in playing it safe, if Blue Film is any indication. Moore says he’s after something riskier, something that challenges not only audiences but himself in the process. Blue Film, he says, gave him that opportunity. “My acting coach, Mark, said this beautiful thing to me,” he says. “He said, ‘Do you want to be a famous actor or a dangerous artist?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I want to be a dangerous artist.’ And I feel like this is the one project where this wonderful team has allowed me to show that I can be that.”
Blue Film premiered in-competition at the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival.