NEED TO KNOW
Scoot McNairy and Emilia Jones are charting a complicated father-daughter journey against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis in their new movie.
Fairyland (in theaters Oct. 10), directed by Andrew Durham, is based on the acclaimed 2013 memoir of the same name by Alysia Abbott. As a new trailer shared exclusively with PEOPLE shows, the page-to-screen adaptation captures young Alysia’s coming of age in San Francisco with her father’s bohemian friends in the 1970s and ’80s.
McNairy, 47, plays Steve Abbott, a poet and activist who comes out as gay following the death of Alysia’s mother. Played by Nessa Dougherty as a child and Jones, 23, as an adult, Alysia is brought up with more than her share of independence, it appears.
Courtesy of Lionsgate and WILLA
“When I was your age, I couldn’t be the person that I wanted to be,” McNairy’s Steve can be heard telling his daughter in the trailer. “And that kind of thing can really eat you up as a kid. I just didn’t want you to be raised the way that I was raised.”
Alysia appears to prefer being what Steve playfully calls “such a normal girl.” But later in the trailer, Jones can be seen confiding in a friend, tears in her eyes: “When you keep a secret about something for so long, it becomes a part of you.”
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Sofia Coppola is among the producers of Fairyland, which premiered to rave reviews at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. It costars Geena Davis as Alysia’s grandmother Munca, as well as Cody Fern, Maria Bakalova, Bella Murphy and Adam Lambert.
Courtesy of Lionsgate and WILLA
Durham, who filmed Fairyland in 21 days, called it “a parallel coming-of-age story” in a 2023 interview with Collider. “This is a story of a daughter, or a young girl, raised by her gay father. If you know anything about that sort of community back then, a lot of those men that came out of the closet in the 1970s during the gay lib movement were going through a second adolescence because they had suppressed that initial adolescence.”
Alysia, he continued, “is coming of age as [Steve] is coming of age again. So we’re watching these two worlds collide and also connect.”
Lambert, 43, read Abbott’s memoir and “thought it was beautiful,” he recalled, revealing a personal connection to her story. “I’ve always loved San Francisco in the ’70s, particularly in the Castro, the gay liberation movement. My mom’s side of the family, they lived there in the Castro during that time. It hits home for me.”
Lionsgate and Willa will distribute Fairyland in theaters Oct. 10.
