Focus Features’ upcoming drama Boy Erased, based on Garrad Conley’s 2016 memoir about his experience in gay conversion camp, comes to theaters this fall.
“The film satisfies the dramatic and salacious stuff that interested me, but it also had an emotional resonance to it that I felt didn’t just make it a dark and nihilistic story,” co-writer and director Joel Edgerton told Entertainment Weekly in May. “Garrard’s story is so full of redemption.”
Boy Erased cast
Lucas Hedges plays Garrad, adapted for the screen as 19-year-old Jared Eamons. Hedge’s supporting role in Manchester by the Sea granted him an Oscar nomination last year. You’ve also seen him in Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe play the teen’s parents, Nancy and Baptist Pastor Marshall. Edgerton plays Victor Sykes, the lead therapist at the conversion camp.
Hedges told MTV News earlier this year that working with Kidman in particular was particularly inspiring for him. “I mean, every single day she stepped on set, it was like I didn’t even need to do my job,” he said. “I just looked at her and it was taken care of.”
Kidman told EW, “The way in which [Nancy] and her husband feel about putting [Jared] into conversion therapy, I wanted that to come from a place of a mother thinking it’s the right thing to do. Nothing that she did was vindictive, which is probably why they have such a strong relationship now.”
The cast also includes singer Troye Sivan, who plays another boy in the conversion camp, and Xavier Dolan.
Boy Erased plot
The official synopsis of Boy Erased that Focus Features provides reads:
“Boy Erased tells the story of Jared (Hedges), the son of a Baptist pastor in a small American town, who is outed to his parents (Kidman and Crowe) at age 19. Jared is faced with an ultimatum: attend a conversion therapy program — or be permanently exiled and shunned by his family, friends and faith. Boy Erased is the true story of one young man’s struggle to find himself while being forced to question every aspect of his identity.”
Boy Erased trailer
“I want you to have a great life. I love you, but we cannot see a way that you can live under this roof if you’re going to fundamentally go against the grain of our beliefs,” Crowe, as Hedge’s father in the film, tells him.
Watch the first official Boy Erased trailer below. It’s riveting.
Boy Erased release date
“You get to walk into the living room of one family’s life and see the destructive nature of judgment and opinion,” Edgerton told MTV News earlier this year of the film. “That hopefully flowers out to speak to the bigger political aspects.”
Boy Erased is reportedly coming to U.S. theaters November 2.
