Trailer for Sundance thriller ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ from Academy Award nominee Dee Rees

Adapted from the Joan Didion novel of the same title, The Last Thing He Wanted is set against the nebulous milieu of the Iran-Contra scandal. Veteran D.C. journalist Elena McMahon (Academy Award® winner Anne Hathaway) abandons the 1984 campaign trail out of a misguided sense of duty to her father, Dick McMahon (Oscar® nominee Willem Dafoe). Guilted into running a dangerous fool’s errand on his behalf, Elena leverages the moment to pursue her own investigation but instead gets tipped into the confounding center of the very intrigue she’s trying to expose. Answers turn into questions and wrong turns lead to dead ends in this stylish political thriller as Elena becomes increasingly lost on a map of someone else’s making and the possibility of return — to home and to herself — slowly narrows.

The fourth film from director and Academy Award® nominated writer Dee Rees (Pariah, Bessie, Mudbound) co-stars Oscar® winner Ben Affleck, Academy Award® nominee Rosie Perez, Edi Gathegi, Mel Rodriguez, Onata Aprile and Toby Jones. Marco Villalobos co-wrote the script, and Cassian Elwes produced with Rees. 

The Last Thing He Wanted will have its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and then be released globally by Netflix on February 21, 2020. Here is the trailer.

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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), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) 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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