It is Ayo Edebiri’s year. The award-winning performer is gaining ground towards a promising horizon in filmmaking and writing. She just signed on to write a live-action feature of the kid’s show Barney with A24 and producer Daniel Kaluuya. Now, in late Sept 2025, Edebiri is straight off of the heels of promoting her role as Maggie in Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt out October 10th. A seething story of betrayal set scenically in the ornate Ivy league hallways of Yale.
Julia Roberts plays Ayo Edebiri’s mentor. “It was cool,” Edebiri says with a smile and pauses to glance at Roberts sitting next to her with their co-star Andrew Garfield, “it was cool”, she repeats to ESSENCE over Zoom. Edebiri is known for her comedic chops and sharp roles in Bottoms and Opus and her leading character Syd in The Bear. Inside Guadagnino’s world, the auteur is famously known for unmasking another side of a performer. His past cinematic visions: Queer, Challengers, Bones and All, reveal his care for building an all-consuming world around a crumbling character.
Roberts performs as Yale philosophy Professor Alma, the self-righteousness that dazzles in her eyes subjugates Edebiri as Maggie, her self-effacing star pupil. Guadagnino manipulates the cutthroat college campus grounds of scholastic elites to satirize generational differences and the way “cancel” culture has taken shape in the contemporary world. “We were farmers for truth,” Garfield chimes in about the immoral cracks within his character. Robert coined working with Gaudagnino as “farming at harvest”—her character represents how a woman in power upholds her status and will surely do whatever it takes to maintain her positioning even if that means hurting another woman reaching for the same status.
Inevitably, the accuser and perpetrator enter a bloodthirsty hunt where either side seeks after their own personal form of justice. “I think for me as a human being, taking it outside of my job or not. We’re all feeling it. We’re all feeling everything,” Edebiri says of the state of media as a creative. “Increasingly by the moment, one could posture, there are people who benefit monetarily from that and from those feelings.”
Unspoken dynamics unravel and Guadagnino breaks physical boundaries between unlikely characters which both disturbs the viewer and makes one question who is really at power when it all is disposable. “The process of making this film necessitated me to slow down and to sort of remove myself from that mode and to really be thoughtful and open to conversations with nuance,” Ayo shares. Guadagnino puts Edebiri’s character at the center of the conflict and her coy nature is forced to come fully into the light when she reckons with a wrongdoing committed by Hank (Andrew Garfield) that sends everyone over the edge.
For the director’s discussion with Edebiri over Maggie’s responsibility in evoking this complicated narrative: “I had to interrogate myself and go, ‘why don’t I like this?,’” Ayo thinks deeply. “That doesn’t negate what I believe. It doesn’t weaken my point or my own history or my own character’s perspective.”
The emotions that come to the surface between Edebiri, Garfield and Roberts’ dueling performances is viscerally entertaining and satisfying. All under Guadagnino’s scrupulous direction and cinematographer Malik Sayeed’s (Belly) visualization, the performative guise of Ivy League school decorum delivers as the perfect dichotomy to the serious nature of what these characters put each other through. The audience is exposed to the internal affairs of daunting institutions and the sheer power they possess. Amazon MGM Studios’ After The Hunt displays what happens when one counters an establishment like Yale. Ayo Edebiri serves as the driving force of Maggie being a smart Black woman searching for people to believe her in a dire situation where her future could be jeopardized opens up a wider social commentary on the United States today.
“Why do I have the convictions I have?” Edebiri feels she always has to question, specifically for a character who has wielded forces against her. “Do they need to be shifted? If so, where or why? How? If not, how do we meet in the middle? I hope that our film is an attempt at continuing the fostering of those types of conversations, of those types of slowing down, listening space for nuance, and space to reject noise and slop.”