Ben Whishaw has never shied away from challenging material, but his latest project took endurance to a new level. The British actor revealed that for his upcoming film Peter Hujar’s Day, he had to memorize a staggering 55 pages of dialogue — while his co-lead, Rebecca Hall, had only three.
The film, directed by Ira Sachs, is based on a real 1974 conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. The transcript of their discussion — rediscovered in 2019 and later published as a book — became the foundation for the screenplay. Sachs’s adaptation transforms that conversation into a single, sustained cinematic exchange, where Whishaw takes on the role inspired by Hujar and Hall plays Rosenkrantz.
Speaking about the production at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Whishaw described the process as “a marathon of words.” The script, nearly verbatim from the original tapes, gave him the vast majority of the film’s lines. “It’s just me talking for an hour,” he said. “Rebecca’s job was to listen — and she does it beautifully.”
While the imbalance might seem unfair, it’s a deliberate creative choice. The film’s structure reflects the dynamic of the real conversation, in which Hujar speaks freely about his art and the 1970s New York creative scene, while Rosenkrantz mostly observes and prompts. Hall’s quiet presence grounds the piece, giving Whishaw’s monologue emotional resonance and space to breathe.
Critics at Sundance called the film hypnotic — a minimalist two-hander built entirely around human voice and expression. Whishaw’s 55 pages of dialogue unfold in real time, blurring the line between performance and confession, while Hall’s subtle reactions offer the emotional counterpoint.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to hold that much in my head,” Whishaw told reporters. “It felt like theatre — one long, unbroken take of thought and feeling.”
Peter Hujar’s Day continues Sachs’s fascination with small-scale, emotionally charged storytelling, following films like Passages and Keep the Lights On. There’s no release date yet, but after its Sundance debut, the project has already drawn attention for its unusual premise — and for Whishaw’s tour-de-force feat of memory.
For Whishaw and Hall, the challenge wasn’t about who spoke more, but about balance: one actor delivering a flood of words, the other shaping silence into its own kind of dialogue.
