Slapping 'God’s gift' Julia Roberts was 'tough' for costar Ayo Edebiri

Ayo Edebiri has dabbled in on-screen violence before. But playing a member of a teenage fight club in the comedy “Bottoms” is one thing. Slapping the taste out of Julia Roberts’ mouth is a whole other.

“One of the worst things I've ever had to do,” Edebiri says in a Zoom interview alongside Roberts.

In director Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller “After the Hunt” (in select theaters now, nationwide Oct. 17), Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Roberts) is up for tenure and hosts parties with her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) for their friends and colleagues, including Alma’s fellow instructor Hank (Andrew Garfield) and her star student Maggie (Edebiri).

When Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault, Alma is torn between her prize protege and her close confidante. Soon her life begins to spiral as Alma desperately tries to keep one of her own secrets hidden, and her relationship with Maggie turns combative. That conflict comes to a head in the middle of campus in the film’s most intense scene as Alma verbally belittles and demeans her until Maggie snaps and suddenly smacks her mentor.

Roberts loves the dialogue in that moment, with “Alma just ticking down the list of all the ways that she sees this girl exposed,” she says. “It’s great when a character hits that tipping point, and these are the electric moments that really bring us to the edge of our seat.”

But the slap itself was “tough,” Edebiri says. “You are enacting violence on another person and your fellow actor. That takes a lot of trust and just solid foundation of communication and safety. And then when that person is God's gift to planet Earth, Julia Roberts, it's not ideal.”

There was some trepidation. Edebiri says she needed to have a conversation with Roberts about it “because I was not looking at her in the eye the closer that it was getting to that moment. She was like, ’It’s OK. You ultimately can slap me and must slap me but, like, let's do it and do it right, and then we won't have to do it too many times,” she says with a laugh.

Adds Roberts: “Let's not belabor it. Bring it, but don't hurt me.”

The Oscar winner wanted Edebiri “to feel comfortable” because “it's harder to slap someone than to be slapped in a scene. And I've been slapped by Sean Penn,” Roberts quips, referring to a heated scene in the historical drama series “Gaslit.” 

“I’m here to tell you, I will take Ayo any day of the week. But I slapped him back pretty good.”

One of the hallmarks of Guadagnino’s movies, like the Oscar-nominated "Call Me by Your Name" and "Challengers," is the way characters are driven by “intimacy and honesty,” Edebiri says. “They create friction, and definitely (in ‘After the Hunt’) that's a moment that friction was literally created.”