Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley have already lined up their next project together after the awards-season run of Hamnet. The two Irish stars will reunite for Hold on to Your Angels, a new film that places them in a dramatic love story set on the edge of South Louisiana.
Mescal will play a “hell-bound outlaw,” while Buckley takes on the role of a “ferocious shepherd of lost souls.” The film follows the pair as they “fall in catastrophic love” while their decaying bayou world begins to collapse around them.
A new collaboration after Hamnet
Their reunion comes soon after they wrapped their Hamnet awards campaign in March. In Chloe Zhao’s film, Mescal portrayed William Shakespeare and Buckley played his wife, Agnes, with both earning strong praise for their performances.
Buckley’s run for the role became especially notable during awards season, ending with the Best Actress Oscar in March. The quick move into another shared project suggests that the screen pairing has already proven valuable on both the creative and audience fronts.
What Hold on to Your Angels is about
Hold on to Your Angels is being directed by Beasts of the Southern Wild filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, who also wrote the script. The film is described as an outlaw romance set in a fragile corner of South Louisiana, with Plan B calling it an “epic love story” that blends “intense realism, myth and magic.”
Zeitlin said the project is “the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed” and described it as a story about an “endangered way of life” as well as “a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.” The director also said he had been imagining the film for years after meeting Pam Harper, who played Little Jo in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Why the project is drawing attention
The film links two acclaimed performers with a director known for emotionally charged, visually distinctive storytelling. It also returns Zeitlin to a Louisiana setting, this time with a story centered on romance, instability, and survival rather than childhood resilience.
Plan B has described the movie as a production with a “powerful mix of intense realism, myth and magic,” which places it in the same broad artistic lane as Zeitlin’s earlier work. That combination, along with Mescal and Buckley’s recent success in Hamnet, gives the project immediate awards-season and prestige-film interest.
Production timing and cast details
Production on Hold on to Your Angels will not begin until February 2027 because Mescal is occupied for much of the year with the four-film Beatles project, where he plays Paul McCartney. That schedule means the new collaboration is still some time away, but the cast and director are already in place.
The key details of the project are straightforward:
- Paul Mescal stars as a hell-bound outlaw.
- Jessie Buckley plays a ferocious shepherd of lost souls.
- Benh Zeitlin directs from his own script.
- The story is set in South Louisiana.
- Filming begins in February 2027.
With Hamnet still fresh in industry memory and both actors coming off major acclaim, Hold on to Your Angels is shaping up as a high-profile reunion built around strong performances and a distinctly cinematic setting.
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