Summary

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff sits with Love, Brooklyn’s André Holland, DeWanda Wise, and Roy Wood Jr. at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

In this interview, Holland talks about working with Rachael Abigail Holder on her feature debut, as well as how filmmaker Steven Soderbergh was crucial in getting this film to screen.

The cast also discusses how they connected to Holder’s work, their characters, the film’s themes, and highlight important members behind the scenes.

New York City, specifically the streets of Brooklyn, becomes the backdrop to a timeless love story that also encompasses the notion of letting go. In Love, Brooklyn, André Holland plays freelance writer Roger, who is struggling to write a letter to his city, one that is always changing. The drama is Rachael Abigail Holder’s feature debut, coming from the experience of directing television episodes and playwriting, collaborating with screenwriter Paul Zimmerman to present us with a layered, heartfelt, and humorous tale of acceptance.
Holland is joined by DeWanda Wise and Nicole Beharie, who respectively play Nicole, Roger’s new “situationship,” and Casey, his ex. Each character is trying to move on from something in their lives, bringing heart and poignancy to this midlife coming-of-age story. Roy Wood Jr., Cassandra Freeman, and Cadence Reese also join the charismatic cast, each imparting their own character’s experience to the central storyline and themes.
Premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Love, Brooklyn’s cast members Holland (who is also a producer), Wise, and Wood Jr. join Perri Nemiroff in Collider’s media studio at the Rendezvous Cinema Center. Holland talks about getting the film off the ground with Steven Soderbergh’s support and working with Holder on her first feature. The cast members also reveal how they connected with both Holder and their characters, finding a link to themes of grief, choice, and feeling like you’re in a rut. Hear about all this and the unsung heroes that contributed to this film in the video above, or you can follow along with the transcript below.
André Holland Tries His Hand at a Hugh Grant-Esque Romance in ‘Love, Brooklyn’

“I grew up watching these kinds of romance movies.”

Image via Sundance Institute

PERRI NEMIROFF: André, I’ll give you these duties as a producer on Love, Brooklyn. Can you give us a brief synopsis of the film?
ANDRÉ HOLLAND: The movie is called Love, Brooklyn, and it takes place in modern-day Brooklyn. It is a romance story that is about a writer named Roger, who I’m playing, who’s going through an artistic block and also having some real relationship struggles, as well. Through him, we meet these two other characters, one played by DeWanda and the other by Nicole Beharie. We find that the three of them are sort of intertwined in this complicated relationship that they’re trying to navigate.
A+ ensemble. But I’m going to stick with you producing for a quick second. When this project came your way, what was it about the material that made you say to yourself, “I can best support Rachael and her vision by not just being an actor in it but also producing for her?”
HOLLAND: Rachael was really passionate about the script when she first came to me, and I was excited to support her. She has worked in television quite a bit, and she’s a playwright by nature, by training, but she really wanted to make her first feature. I’ve had the great fortune in my career to work with a lot of first-time feature directors, and I wanted to help her make her movie. Then, on a personal level, I also really wanted to have an opportunity to play a character like this. I grew up watching these kinds of romance movies with Hugh Grant and all these guys, and I thought it would be fun to try my hand at something like that.
Financing ‘Love, Brooklyn’ Was Difficult — Until Steven Soderbergh

“People are really risk-averse.”

Image by Photagonist

One more producing question for you because I also know Steven Soderbergh is involved. I just saw him recently for Presence, and every time I see him, I stop and say to myself, “I’m grateful that he is a filmmaker and doing his thing, but he’s also using his platform to lift up people around him.” In general, what do you appreciate about what he does in this industry, and how did he directly help Love, Brooklyn be the film that it ultimately became?
HOLLAND: We pitched this movie all over town, and most people said no. Pretty much everybody said no, frankly. But Steven and I have a longstanding relationship. I was able to go to him, and we talked through it, and he really saw what it is that we wanted to make and not only backed it financially but also backed it creatively. That’s one way in which he shows up. I also admire him in the same way that you do: his efficiency, his ambition, his ability, like you said, to inspire other filmmakers. There are so many people—actors, directors, producers—who say the same thing, that they owe so much of their careers to Steven, either directly or indirectly.
He takes risks. He tries new things, different kinds of stories, different kinds of filming techniques. I can’t get enough of his stuff.
HOLLAND: Distribution. Everything.

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Because you just brought this up, and I can’t process it having seen the finished product, why would someone say no? Honestly, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer kind of story to me.
HOLLAND: Thank you. I felt the same way. You know how it is in Hollywood. People are really risk-averse. Unless you’ve done the thing, people don’t think you can do the thing. I’m sure people had all kinds of reasons, but all we needed was one person to say yes, and we got that person.
Rachael Holder Gives Actors Space to Improvise in ‘Love, Brooklyn’

“It was just a real beautiful return to nerdy, artistic form.”

Images via Sundance Institute

I will take a moment to highlight Rachael’s work because I think if she wants to stay in the feature filmmaking realm, she very much can and will go on to make more movies. For each of you, what is something about her as an actor’s director and a leader on this production that you appreciated and you’re now excited for even more actors to experience in the future?
DEWANDA WISE: We’re both very highly sensitive people. It was just a real beautiful return to nerdy, artistic form to work with someone who was so heart-centered. Because you’re going to get a level of humanity in the work that you might not have gotten otherwise in someone who’s less earnest or more terrified of their inner life and their emotions. It was really a joy for me to be able to go to a bit of a deeper level, artistically and emotionally.

Image by Photagonist

ROY WOOD JR: I think what you need as an actor is a director and producers who trust you to be able to do something different. I think everybody in this film, we’re all familiar from other projects, but you will see us all operating in a different sandbox, performatively speaking. I think that that is probably what I would look forward to the most if I ever get to work with Rachael again. Any actor that ever gets to work with her again, especially in the feature capacity, because in television, a lot of times, directors are being dropped into something that is already on the tracks, and your job is to keep it on the tracks. Here, you get to build the track. I’m just excited for any actor that gets to work with her.
HOLLAND: She’s really good at giving us space. She trusts her actors. Not all directors do. So she understood when to step back and give us space to improvise a bit if we needed to and find our way into the character.
Many Unsung Heroes Brought ‘Love, Brooklyn’ to Life

“He is light personified.”

Image by Photagonist

I like asking this every once in a while. I get the sense that it was good vibes between you all and her, and beyond. I’ll preface this by saying I know it’s an unfair question because every single person who contributes to making a movie is vital to the process. Can you each name an unsung hero on the set of Love, Brooklyn, someone who maybe we don’t get to hear their name very often, but they stepped up in a way that teed you up to deliver your best work?
WISE: Hans [Augustave] was on our AD team, and he is a director himself. I’ve worked with him on numerous projects now, and he is like light personified. He’s not only one of the most extraordinary second ADs—sometimes he’s a first AD—that I’ve ever worked with, he’s also a director in his own right and such a filmmaker that he knows how to make that set work.
That is such a good quality for an AD to have. That makes me so happy. Light personified.
WOOD JR: I’m just thankful for our writer, Mr. [Paul] Zimmerman, who put the script together. It wasn’t written necessarily with this type of culture in mind, but it just proves that if you write a timeless story about love, you can drop anybody into it. We were halfway through production, and I was like, “A white dude wrote this?” [Laughs]
WISE: He was like, “Hi, DeWanda.” [Laughs]
WOOD JR: I was like, “André, why you ain’t tell me?” Not that I would have said no, but you get what I’m saying. It was like, “Wait… Okay, I guess we’re doing it. It just feels good.”
WISE: Very cool.
HOLLAND: I would say our associate producer. Her name is Lanaria Johnson. She’s actually sat right there. She’s been there from the very beginning, day one, from the time we were trying to raise money to do the movie to the development of the script. Every day of shooting. There were so many fires that had to be put out, and she was the main firefighter. Talk about people who go unsung. The movie would not exist without Lanaria.
That’s why it’s one of my favorite questions. I wish we could answer it over and over and over again!
WISE: We should.
The Cast Reveal How They Connected to Grief and Choice

“There’s kind of an odd peace on the other side of it.”

Image via Sundance Institute

I want to make sure to take a moment to highlight all of your characters. Someone recently explained to me how exciting it can be to jump into a new role, and you’re on unstable ground, but then you have that moment when you think of something or you do something, and you’re like, “I get who my character is.” Did each of you have that with your own character in this film?
WISE: I think there was just something about the quality of experiencing the worst thing that you could think of happening to you, and an exploration of grief that we haven’t seen before, which is like, there’s kind of an odd peace on the other side of it. If your greatest fear happens, and you are still here living on planet Earth. Like, “Wow, this is strange.” There’s this floating, ethereal, almost Zen-like, honestly—which was the exploration—quality to my character that I just had a beautiful time [with]. I feel like I’m still living in her.
WOOD JR: I play the only married character in the show, so I kind of represent if Andre is trying to decide to choose, my character has chosen. How committed are you to that choice once you have made it? And having an opportunity to be a little bit more grounded, performatively, just in those scenes, I really appreciate it because, in real life, that’s where my stand-up was starting to go around the same time. It was very cool to be funny but also just be real.

Image by Photagonist

Pitch perfect in that respect, and I mean it sincerely.
HOLLAND: The experience that Roger goes through of being stuck in his work, that’s something that really I understood. Sitting alone in a room trying to figure out, “What am I going to do? How am I going to make this thing work?” Whether that’s the piece he’s trying to write or, in my case, often it’s the struggles that I’ve had as an actor, trying to get into a character or find a job or keep a job or whatever it is. That sense of stuckness, once I understood that part of him, I felt like I really understood the character.
It breaks my heart that I have to wrap with you, and I will say, the amount of time we’ve spent does not do Love, Brooklyn justice. You should all be super proud. And because she’s not here, I just want to shout out how good Nicole is!
WISE: Yes, extraordinary.
Special thanks to our 2025 partners at Sundance including presenting partner Rendezvous Capital and supporting partners Sommsation, The Wine Company, Hendrick’s Gin, neaū water, and Roxstar Entertainment.

Love, Brooklyn

Release Date

January 27, 2025

Runtime

97 Minutes

Director

Amanda McBaine

Writers

Paul Zimmerman