Celebrity

Celebrity Crush: Ben Whishaw

We know talent when we see it.

Means Happy

31 Jan 2025 — 3 min read

The latest project for Ben Whishaw is the film, Peter Hujar’s Day.

Peter Hujar was a gay man who was a celebrated photographer in the 70s and 80s - he died in 1987 as a result of AIDS-related illnesses.

Currently doing the rounds of the film festival circuit, Peter Hujar's Day is directed by Ira Sachs. As well Ben Whishaw, the cast also includes Rebecca Hall.

The story of the film is adapted from a phone conversation that Hujar had with a friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Hall) in 1974. The conversation was recorded - the transcript of that conversation is the foundation of the film.

In the conversation, Rosenkrantz asked Hujar to recall everything he did the previous day. The conversation was recorded because it was intended to be part of a book project that Rosenkrantz was working on which ultimately didn't progress.

The transcript of the call was discovered in 2019 at New York’s Morgan Library. Ira Sach's became aware of it when he saw it referred to in a book he was reading.

Speaking about the film, Whishaw says it was unlike any role he’d done before, given the amount of dialogue he had to memorise.

“It was really difficult to learn it...” explained Whishaw. “I showed it to a friend of mine who’s a musician and she was like, ‘Fuck, this is impossible, this is like trying to learn someone else’s improvisation,’ which is a bit what it was like because it’s not a written thing. It is written down, but it’s full of all of the strangenesses of speech and the way people speak. It became very fascinating to learn, although very difficult.”

“The fact that Ben makes every word valuable was not something I could know beforehand...” said Sachs. “Every word counts and he conveys that, so there is an interest that seemed complete to me, and I wanted to see it through.”