What you need to know
- We have our first look at Cherry, starring Tom Holland.
- The first look also includes an interview with the Russo brothers.
Vanity Fair has posted a first look at Cherry, the upcoming Russo brothers film and their first since Avengers: Endgame. News had broke that the film would be coming to Apple TV+ back in September.
Tom Holland plays the main character, a kid from Cleveland who, after returning with PTSD from the Iraq War, resorts to robbing banks to fund his drug habit.
Holland's title character is both volatile and vulnerable, a hard-knock nobody from Cleveland who's just scraping by but doesn't even have any big dreams to guide him. Every solution to his problems only deepens the trouble: College isn't working out, so Cherry joins the Army to serve in Iraq as a medic. He returns home haunted and damaged, and starts abusing opioids to blunt his PTSD. To pay for the drugs, he resorts to bank robbery. The more desperate he gets, the more banks he has to rob.
Director Anthony Russo says that, while the film focuses on one person's journey, they still view the project as an epic film.
"We do think about it as an epic film, and it is very much a person's life journey. But it does have a little bit of a split personality between being this character study and an epic life cycle."
Director Joe Russo talks about how the team used different equipment to bring a unique personality to each part of the story that they wanted to tell.
"He travels a great distance over a 15-year period. The movie's broken up into six chapters that reflect those different periods, and each one has a different tone. It's shot with different lenses, different production design. One's got magical realism. Another chapter is absurdism. Another is horror…There's a bit of gonzo in it. It's raw in its tone. He's a character in existential crisis."
Russo went on to say that they hope that the film causes people to empathize with those who are suffering from PTSD and opioid addiction.
"This is a movie that's supposed to define the experience of having PTSD, the experience of being addicted to opioids. And the mission of the film is to generate empathy, not to generate disdain, not to indict. It was critical that you empathize with his struggle and his journey because a lot of people are going through this, and they're having a very human experience. I think empathy is in incredibly short supply right now in the world. And it's a tragedy."
Cherry will debut in theaters on February 26, 2021, and then premiere globally on Apple TV+ on March 12, 2021.
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