Interview: Lucas Hedges on ‘French Exit’ and working with iconic actresses [VIDEO]

He may only be 24-years old, but Lucas Hedges has already starred in four Best Picture Oscar nominees and two of them in the same year ( 2017’s Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). He’s an Oscar nominee himself, earning a Best Supporting Actor nomination for 2016’s Manchester by the Sea.

In 2020, he starred against two of Hollywood’s most iconic actresses – Meryl Streep in Let Them All Talk and Michelle Pfeiffer in French Exit (review). In French Exit, Hedges plays the dyspeptic son of the formerly well-to-do New York City socialite Pfeiffer. After his father dies and the family finds out they’re penniless, mom and son take the money (what’s left of it) and run – or cruise, as it were – to Paris, meeting up with a melange of eccentrics including the doctor in the ship’s morgue, a shady clairvoyant and a madame played by Valerie Mahaffey (interview).

I talked with Hedges about his experiences on French Exit, suggested the best movie in the ‘Pfeiffer-verse’ for him to watch and asked him about the touchstones in his life that keep him grounded.

Sony Pictures Classics will release French Exit in New York City and Los Angeles on February 12 and expand nationwide on April 2.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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