Interview: Elliot Tuttle and Kieron Moore on ‘Blue Film’
It’s been a long road to release for Blue Film. Elliot Tuttle‘s incendiary, deeply uncompromising debut feature was famously turned away from a number of major American festivals (including Sundance and SXSW) that ultimately found its provocative subject matter too taboo to touch. Now, nearly a year after its world premiere at the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it was met with widespread acclaim, the film has received both a theatrical and digital release via indie distribution outfit Obscured Releasing, marking the long-awaited big-screen debut of what is easily one of the most daring, singular, and quietly devastating American films of recent years.
Blue Film unfolds entirely within the confines of a Los Angeles Airbnb, where fetish camboy Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) has been paid $50,000 to spend a single evening with an anonymous masked client (Tony Award-winning actor Reed Birney). What begins as a coolly transactional encounter, however, soon spirals into something far darker, as the masked stranger reveals himself to be Hank Grant, Aaron’s former middle school teacher. Stripped of their personas and forced to reckon with the wreckage of a shared past, both men descend into a tense, taut, and often unsettlingly tender battle of wills as they wrestle with shame, desire, memory, and the questions about themselves they’ve spent their entire lives running from.
Now that Blue Film is finally arriving on digital after months of festival screenings and a long, often gruelling battle for distribution, Moore says he’s more than ready for general audiences to finally engage with the film. “I’m very ready. I’m not nervous at all,” he laughs. “I thought maybe I would be more nervous at this point, but I’m just very excited. My mom liked me in it, so I’m here.”
A genuinely heavy, deeply demanding role for any actor to take on, let alone one making their feature film debut, the character of Aaron Eagle is one that, in lesser hands, might have very easily come across as cold, distant, or one-dimensional. But Moore, who is in almost every single scene of the film, turns in a hauntingly soulful, almost unbearably vulnerable performance that not only ranks among the best of the year, but also undoubtedly cements his status as one of the most exciting and fearless new actors of his generation. For Tuttle, the search for his Aaron was the easiest, and most providential, part of the casting process. “Certainly a lot of actors weren’t interested, but a lot of great ones were, and Kieron really blew us away in the room,” he says. “Him and Reed get on fabulously. Watching the film now, it is Kieron’s movie through and through. If there’s one thing I’m the most proud about, it’s their performances. I’m so proud to have cast them and have them in this movie.”
For Moore, the project first came across his radar through his manager, who knew the kind of brave, deeply uncompromising work the actor had been hungering for. “He had a belief in the script immediately as well, and I read it. I was just stunned. I was like, ‘This is incredible,'” recalls Moore. “I believe the premise causes some friction. But I think any actor that says that — if you take that away for a moment and ask about what they’d like to do as a performer — I think it would be ludicrous to say no. It’s what every actor dreams of: the complexity, the humanness, the ability to deep-dive into what it means to exist, and our shame, and all these questions I think secretly we ask ourselves. Some of us are more confident to express that we ask them.”
Were there ever any nerves about being part of such a daring project? “It’s funny, because immediately there was, like, one little voice of fear of how will I be perceived. But that quickly went away,” he admits. “Because I’m like, if you want to be brave, you’ve got to be a bit scared. My biggest fear really was watching someone else do it. I just couldn’t have lived with that. So I tried my best to get it. And then my other fear was just doing it justice, because I can’t tell you how well-written that script is. I just wanted to make sure that I was worthy enough.”
In Tuttle’s screenplay, the role of Aaron is a uniquely layered one. On the surface, he’s loud, brash, and bold, the absolute picture of camboy bravado. But as the film progresses, that surface persona slowly cracks open to reveal the more fragile, deeply scarred Alex McConnell underneath. For Tuttle, that internal duality was the very engine of the character. “The character of Aaron exists in lots of porn — it’s this fin-dom camboy that is bragging about how fucking hot he is and to pay him,” he explains. “There’s an interesting irony there that allowed me to play with this kind of transient identity that this character has — the slip between his assumed self and his true self. That was entirely the character’s arc in my head, to just watch this young man kind of crumble over the course of an evening and see what is left at the end.”
It’s a character that, Tuttle reveals, is partly informed by his own personal experience as a queer man in a major American city, as well as deep research into the lives of sex workers and content creators. “A lot of that character is definitely informed by feelings that I’ve had of being a gay guy in a major city, and the experience of just living,” he says. “In that way, it feels very personal. I was also definitely informed by research on sex workers, content creators. I have friends that do that. I’ve listened to lots of personal testimony, and those things all wrote into the character.”
To breathe life into the character, Moore worked closely with Tuttle to align his interpretation with Tuttle’s vision, while also carving out his own intuitive understanding of who Aaron (and Alex) really are. “I always have my own secrets. There were still thoughts I wanted to think about whilst I was playing Aaron — I didn’t even tell Elliot,” he reveals. “But a lot of it was conversation between me and Elliot. We aligned for me immediately. Once we got off the plane earlier, we talked, and ideas were kind of meshing straight away. Elliot actually became the final piece of my armour and puzzle.” Working alongside his acting coach Mark, Moore arrived at the core of his approach early on. “If I do this right, I can play two people trying to become one. I hope that’s evident in the movie. That’s something that we discussed, and I just let it happen.”
Crucially, Tuttle ultimately handed Aaron over to Moore, allowing the actor to make the character his own. “Elliot supported me so much,” gushes Moore. “He did something that is the bravest thing — the best thing a writer can do. He gave the character to me and said, ‘Make him your own after a certain point.’ I think that’s something that must be incredibly difficult. How can you write something, you bring so many ideas to it, but he gave me all the information he could, and he trusted me, and he said, ‘Dance.’ Very, very freeing.”
Asked whether the two of them ever discussed Aaron’s backstory in detail, including his life as a child, a teen, and a young adult before the events of the film, Moore confirms they did, though he stresses that not all of it needed to make it onto the page. “There were certain bits of the script that aren’t there anymore because of editing purposes,” he says. “But I do think these things are sometimes just for the audience. It doesn’t make the final part of the movie for a reason. I also think, as an audience member, we meet these characters at this pocket of time, and we just have to accept them for who they are. We have to learn who they are through what they’re willing to tell us. I’ve seen people argue about this movie — like, ‘No, he was lying there.’ They become who you want them to be, or who you’re willing to see them as.”
Since premiering at Edinburgh last year, Blue Film has been met with reactions ranging from rapturous acclaim to fierce outrage, with audiences arguing about its meaning, its morality, and what it ultimately has to say about its two characters, exactly the kind of charged, generative conversation that any film of this nature ought to spark. For Moore, that reaction has been one of the most rewarding aspects of the entire experience. “I was pleasantly surprised. The movie obviously has some murky waters about it, and the subject is the undercurrent — you can’t avoid it as part of the movie that gets us to where we’re going,” he says. “But the thing that’s really amazed me is how many people have been brave enough — and I guess adult enough, is that the right word? — to see what else the movie is saying. It gives us an opportunity to sit with shame and lust and desire and meaning — all these things that come from the movie that are much more than the main premise that sits beneath it.”
If Moore is the film’s blistering soul, then Birney is its quiet, devastating anchor, turning in what is undoubtedly a career-best performance as the deeply troubled and self-loathing Hank Grant. For Tuttle, getting Birney on board was something of a creative miracle, with the Tony Award-winning actor signing on almost immediately after reading the screenplay. “He was my first choice. He’s the first person I sent the script to outside of the immediate production at that point. I really wanted him to do it,” he recalls. “He’d done this film called Mass that is similarly kind of staged, and I just think he’s a brilliant actor. He agreed to do it, and it was off to the races. Very, very rarely has that happened to me, where I have the dream person I would love to play this role, sent it to them, okay, they’re into it, let’s go shoot in a few months. Having Reed was a real blessing. He’s a real artist.”
For Moore, sharing the screen with a performer of Birney’s calibre was both immensely rewarding and, at first, more than a little intimidating. “I’m in love with that man. He’s so generous and he’s been so kind to me. He’s become a real support system and believer,” gushes Moore. “He’s convinced me that I am doing the right thing, which, as a young actor, is not lost on you. When you’re faced with rejection constantly and you’ve got people behind you who’ve had that experience and they believe in you — you start to believe in it yourself.”
“I didn’t want to waste Reed’s time. As a performer, I want to be worthy of sharing the scene with him,” he continues. “Once I heard action, obviously, let it go. But all up until that, I wanted to impress, really. I wanted to show that I can do it.”
It’s a sentiment that crystallises in a particularly beautiful anecdote about a moment shared between Moore and Birney on set, one that has clearly stuck with the young actor in the months since they wrapped. “Reed is so good, so remarkable. There’s a texture to his voice, an ability to sort of see through what he says,” explains Moore. “I remember one day being like, ‘How do you do that with your voice? I’m just fascinated. I want to be able to do that.’ And he said, ‘You won’t be able to. Not for a long time.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean? Tell me how to do it and I’ll work on it.’ And he goes, ‘It’s called life. You’ve not had it yet.’ It was just kind of like a permission, I think. It was really beautiful. It was like, you can’t have it all at once. A massive part of being an actor is to live and to exist. I won’t be able to play every role up until I’ve had the experience to do so. It inspired me. Gave me hope. I think about it a lot — just kind of slow down, man. Everything that’s happening to you is happening at the right time.”
One of the most quietly remarkable things about Blue Film, especially given the magnitude of its subject matter, is the way in which it refuses to provide its characters with neat, easy resolutions, instead concluding on a quiet, devastating note of fragile possibility. The first moment, perhaps, in either character’s life when something like understanding feels within reach. For Tuttle, that ending was always the only ending. “I don’t think it ever changed, because really, that is the first moment in the story where either character would have an inkling about how to go on living the rest of their life,” he explains. “As soon as you get to a point in the story when you can send the audience on their way, then I think it’s your responsibility to do so. As soon as you reach that moment where an audience could conceivably understand these people in the greater context of what the rest of their life is going to be, that is when the story ends.”
“It’s the first moment when Aaron becomes Alex again, and when Hank has an answer to something that has plagued him for a long time,” he continues. “From with that information, they could conceivably live the rest of their life in a different way than when we met them. And that was the story I was trying to tell. That moment in their story is when the story ends.”
While Blue Film most certainly does not endorse the behaviour it depicts (quite the contrary), it refuses to look away from it either, presenting a stark and unflinching portrait of its central men without judgement, leaving audiences to draw their own conclusions in their own time. To Tuttle, that ethos is at the very core of the film, and one that draws directly from the work of acclaimed French filmmaker Catherine Breillat (Last Summer), whose own work has long interrogated the most uncomfortable corners of human sexuality. “Catherine Breillat has a quote where she says we must eradicate puritanicalism, because that at its core is where perversion lives. Or something like that, I might be a little bit off, but that’s pretty much it,” says Tuttle.
In approaching such a delicate, deeply taboo subject, Tuttle says his research consisted of immersing himself in personal testimony of those who have lived these realities, particularly through the 2014 documentary Pervert Park, which proved hugely influential on the writing of Hank. “Most of the research you can do is just kind of listen to personal testimony. There’s a million YouTube videos with people who have disguised faces and voices saying that they’re a pedophile but they’ve never acted on it, and they never will. That’s, like, one sect of these people,” he explains. “Of course, there are plenty of sex offenders who have offended and I’m sure will offend again, and others that have vowed not to. That is kind of the conceit of the documentary Pervert Park, which was hugely informative to this film, just because that is the character of Hank. There are plenty of easily accessible personal testimonies of people who are very open and honest about their history as a sex offender, and what they feel — if they feel they were born this way or not.”
It’s a research process that taught him just how wildly varied each individual experience truly is, reinforcing his belief that the only honest way to approach the material was as a focused character study, rather than as any kind of broader statement about its subjects. “No experience, none of these people’s experiences are the same. One could not possibly try to represent all sex workers, all gay people, all sex offenders and pedophiles in a film,” he says. “You just have to write a character study and stay true to the character that you build, because it would be impossible to do anything else.”
With Blue Film finally reaching audiences, Moore is already gearing up for what comes next. The actor will next be seen in Crave, an upcoming genre film opposite Jason Isaacs, due out later this fall, that will see him stretching his wings in an entirely new direction. “Look, this has been the greatest gift for me. The movie’s already become much more than I thought it ever would,” he says of Blue Film. “But this man has made it incredibly difficult for me now, because when I read other scripts, there is a dragon that I chase now. Depth, I guess. It’s made me more particular. I want to do characters that challenge me in some way. They won’t all be like Blue Film. I’ve got a movie coming out late in the fall with Jason Isaacs that is very much a genre movie, a different genre than I’ve done. I’m playing a character completely different to Blue Film. That’s kind of where I want my career to live for a little bit.”
“I would love to keep getting away with things I shouldn’t be able to get away with — in the sense of, he’s not like that in real life,” he continues. “I want to look back and go, ‘They were all so different.’ Whatever that is, I’m finding it, I’m holding it. It’s beautiful. Praise is really great, and I hope it inspires other actors, because people are saying wonderful things, but I’m still fighting to get in the room for stuff. It’s tough, and I think that just makes it more exciting.”
A blistering, fiercely uncompromising debut feature anchored by two of the year’s most extraordinary performances, Blue Film arrives in theaters and on digital as one of the boldest American films of recent memory, a film that will haunt, provoke, and spark countless conversations long after the credits roll. It cements Tuttle as one of the most exciting and audacious new voices in independent cinema, and Moore as a young actor of rare gravity, range, and quiet ferocity. It’ll undoubtedly be interesting to see what they both do next.
Blue Film is now playing in select theaters and is now available on digital via Obscured Releasing.