After a successful festival, theatrical and awards run with Hamnet, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley will reteam for love story Hold on to Your Angels from Benh Zeitlin.

Zeitlin, who was behind Beasts of the Southern Wild, wrote and will direct the movie set on the edge of South Louisiana. Mescal will play “a hell-bound outlaw,” and Buckley will play “a ferocious shepherd of lost souls”, who then “fall in catastrophic love as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under,” according to the film’s synopsis.

“Hold on to Your Angels is the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed — an outlaw romance for the end of America, set on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana. I’ve been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild seventeen years ago. It’s a love letter to an endangered way of life — and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet, said Zeitlin, who last directed the Searchlight film, Wendy.

Plan B will produce Hold on to Your Angels, along with Oscar-winner Alex Coco (Anora, Red Rocket) under his Rapt Film banner. 

The project, which will begin filming in February, will sell out of the Cannes market with CAA handling domestic and the Veterans selling international rights.

Buckley picked up the best actress Oscar for her role in Hamnet and was last in theaters with the Maggie Gyllenhaal monster movie The Bride! She is repped by CAA, United Agents and Johnson Shapiro. Mescal, who is set to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ Beatles movies, is repped by CAA and Curtis Brown Group. Zeitlin is repped by CAA and Lichter Grossman.

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