It’s a minor miracle that Our Hero, Balthazar ever even got made. The film, which celebrated its world debut at the Tribeca Festival earlier this month, is not easy to categorize. It follows a privileged New York teen named Balthazar “Balthy” Malone (Jaeden Martell), who wants to stop a school shooting to impress a girl who is clearly not interested in him. To that end, he starts chatting with a boy online named Solomon (Asa Butterfield) who claims he’s going to shoot up a school. Balthy then flies to Texas in an attempt to stop Solomon, at which point madness ensues.
While this may sound like a drama, it’s actually a comedy. Or at least… kind of. Because there are also some incredibly harrowing dramatic moments, and the film certainly leaves viewers with lots to mull over. It’s not a movie with an easily digestible, straight-forward message. In short, it’s most producers’ worst nightmare.
“It can’t be said enough how hard it is to get a movie like this made about this subject matter, the way that [this movie] is about this subject matter,” says the film’s co-writer and producer Ricky Camilleri while the cast and crew are in Parade‘s office studio during the festival. “I can’t tell you how many people read the script and said, ‘Well if it was a horror movie, maybe we could help you out here,’ and we would think to ourselves, ‘Why would we want to make this a horror movie? That’s actually exploitative of the subject matter.'”
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Luckily, the fate of Our Hero, Balthazar changed dramatically thanks to Noah Centineo. The To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before actor caught the producing bug after working as a producer on his Netflix show The Recruit and set up his own production company Arkhum Productions with Enzo Marc in 2023. Their first release is Our Hero, Balthazar.
After watching Camilleri and director/co-writer Oscar Boyson‘s previous film at Sundance, Centineo sat down for lunch with the pair, and they gave him the script.
“The next day, [Noah had] already read our two scripts and was just like in,” Boyson remembers, still shocked at how quickly the project took off. “When you’re putting your idea out there, when somebody doesn’t respond quickly, it sucks. You try to just put it out of your head. When you find allies like Noah who are giving you fuel, it’s so energizing. That’s basically the reason to do this stuff, creating something that gets momentum.”
For Centineo, signing on was a no-brainer due to how unique Our Hero, Balthazar is. “It’s so rare to find a film that is dangerous like this, dealing with a very important subject matter that affects all of us here in America,” says Centineo. “And telling it in a way that is respectful and really interrogates it, but also is digestible because it’s funny. There’s so much humanity in it. When you find that, you gotta hold onto it. You gotta do everything you can for it. You gotta fight for it.”
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Our Hero, Balthatzar
Camilleri and Boyson, who met in 2001 at a summer film program “for teenage nerds” as Boyson puts it, have been working together for years, but started writing Our Hero, Balthazar in 2022.
“We did start writing right around the wake of Uvalde,” Boyson says, referring to the 2022 school shooting in Texas. “There were stories about the way that shooter was corresponding with strangers online that got us talking.”
Boyson and Camilleri began thinking about times they’d seen “something really messed up” on online message boards and in comment sections, but couldn’t really do anything about it.
“But what if we gave that to Balthazar, who would go about doing something in a very alienating way?” Boyson ponders.
“He has the means to do something,” says Camilleri. “He’s a wealthy kid, but he doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to do it right. I think that became the driving engine of the movie, watching him make mistakes, misunderstand and make things worse.”
Another trend that Boyson was interested in at around the same time were people posting videos of themselves crying online. Combining a rich kid on a mission to stop something bad from happening and performative crying, Boyson and Camilleri created Balthy.
While Martell, now 22, calls Balthy “a confusing guy,” he found himself relating to the character in some ways as he was on a journey of his own filming Our Hero, Balthazar.
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“I’m new at being an adult human, so getting to travel and be on my own a lot and take walks and be solitary, it felt new for me and new for Balthy, too,” he says. “There’s some kind of sorrowful excitement. There’s a sadness and a loneliness there, but there’s a new freedom that I felt was parallel between him and I.”
Even with a particularly gregarious cast and crew, Martell fostered that connection between him and his character. “Everyone was so sweet, and we had a lot of young people [in the crew],” he says. “So it felt like high school or something, and that was really exciting, but I had to stifle that to be lonely Balthazar.”
One aspect of filming that did come naturally to Martell was filming the crying scenes. “I cry all the time,” he says. “I cry when I pee. I cry when I poop. I cry when I sing. I guess I’m pretty good at it. So those scenes were not tricky.”
“The thing with the poop and the pee is it’s somehow linked,” Martell elaborates, citing a fairly widespread medical phenomenon. “There’s something with the glands. There’s some kind of muscle you can move to do it. That’s how Balthy would think about it, in this weird, scientific way that’s so impersonal.”
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Our Hero, Balthazar
While Butterfield, Our Hero, Balthazar‘s other leading man, wasn’t able to make it to the Tribeca Festival premiere, the cast and crew are quick to sing his praises.
“It’s not super common to fly an actor over from England to play a Texan,” Boyson says, commenting on the massive transformation that Butterfield nails while playing the would-school shooter Solomon. “When he shows up in Texas with this fully formed accent and a character, it was such a gift to the whole production.”
Despite Solomon’s darker motives, he’s really the one who gives the movie it’s heart. “I had a great time with Asa,” says Becky Ann Bakerwho play his grandmother in the film. “I saw the film for the first time last night, and I realized I’m the most long person in the film. I have the most loving relationship, and luckily it’s with Asa. We connected right away.”
There’s a scene early on in the film where Solomon helps his grandma out of the bathroom because she forgets her walker and Camilleri remembers that as a scene improvised on the day they filmed.
“That’s the kind of cast we had,” he says. “Everybody’s kind of figuring it out together. Oscar has many superpowers, but one of his great superpowers is giving everybody a chance to bring their ideas to the table, to do it their way. That scene to me is one of the most emotional moments of the movie, especially after seeing so much coldness from Balthazar, and that’s just [Butterfield and Baker] figuring it out together.”
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Our Hero, Balthazar
“I wanted to have no excuse for not prioritizing performance,” Boyson elaborates on his directing style, “so we would always shoot the entire scene all the way through, never break it up. As an actor, you don’t know if the camera might come your way, so we could play it almost more like theater, which keeps everyone on their toes and everyone engaged in the scene.”
Some of the most fun scenes in Our Hero, Balthazar come courtesy of Solomon’s dad, a grifting supplements salesman oozing with toxic masculinity, played by Chris Bauer. When asked about real-life inspiration for his conman, Bauer replies, “I would just say I got out of bed and opened my phone, and with one eye closed, I probably saw 10 [sources of inspiration] in the first hour. There’s just such a steady rain of grift and hucksterism right now that it was pretty easy to access.”
Despite all the hot-button issues, Camilleri insists, “We didn’t want to make a soapbox movie, and we didn’t want to make anything didactic or preachy. We like humor. I hope people have a great time watching the movie, but when they come out of the theater, they want to talk about what the movie meant to them personally and culturally and societally.”
“I hope that nobody walks away saying, ‘Oh, okay, great! Guns are bad. Now I know,’ and feels like they can pat themselves on the back,” he continues.
“Just open your mind a little bit by rearranging your preconceptions,” Boyson chimes in. After all, if Our Hero, Balthazar wasn’t easy to make, it shouldn’t be easy to forget either.
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