At the Roundtable: Power, Privilege, and Generational Betrayal in After the Hunt

After the Hunt cast at the New York Film Festival

When the doors of the Mandarin Oriental’s 35th floor opened on September 27, the room carried a quiet sense of anticipation among the student journalists gathered for the After the Hunt roundtable. The film, which had premiered the previous evening at the New York Film Festival, examines academic secrecy, contested truths, and the disquieting layers of mentorship and betrayal.

Guadagnino arrived with an ensemble worthy of the film’s subject matter: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg, and screenwriter Nora Garrett. What followed was a nuanced exchange that explored Yale’s paradox of privilege and place, the complexities of intergenerational feminism, and the fragile bonds of mentorship that both nurture and betray. The conversation shifted smoothly from Nora Garrett’s reflections on New Haven’s contrasts to Julia Roberts’s struggle with a character defined by posturing, and then to Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri’s candid dialogue on whether betrayal is inherent to mentorship. 

Yale as a Stage for Privilege

My first question went directly to the film’s setting: “You could’ve set this story at any Ivy League school, but you chose Yale, a place with its own cultural mythology, its gothic geography, and its fraught academic traditions. What made Yale more fitting than Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia for a film about power, privilege, and contested truth?”

Nora Garrett, who penned the script, leaned into the personal. “I’ve been to Yale a couple of times. Family members of mine went to Yale, so I had sort of a visual and experiential well to draw from when I was writing.” More than nostalgia, it was the architecture and the stark contrasts that drew her in. “The Gothic architecture was very evocative—both oppressive and lofty simultaneously. Yale promises and contains so much privilege, with a huge endowment, while New Haven, the city that surrounds it, doesn’t get to participate in that same level of privilege. That dichotomy was interesting.”

Guadagnino took the thought further: “The idea of a contained space, the small city of New Haven, and then the smaller space of Yale’s campus, felt to me a great tool to tell this story. The particular eventually becomes the universal. Plus, the light of New Haven, this Gothic campus, is very cinematic. There is a tradition of cinema set in that place that I felt was very strong to bring to life.”

Mentorship and Betrayal

Later in the session, I asked Ayo Edebiri about the thorny intergenerational dynamics her character navigates: “Maggie’s disappointment in Alma reflects a broader generational question. Can Gen Z expect mentorship from older feminists, or are they always betrayed by power dynamics?”

Edebiri paused, asked for the question to be repeated, and then offered a nuanced response. “With every relationship you have with another human being who might have a different identity marker than you, that’s happening at the same time that it’s not happening. I don’t think this film is necessarily saying you can’t expect mentorship just because somebody is older or has more privilege. But between Alma and Maggie, there was definitely a sense of betrayal.” 

Andrew Garfield, sitting beside her, jumped in. “Something about mentorship—true mentorship—has baked into it betrayal. Don’t you think? For the younger to become an elder, there has to be something broken. It feels mythical to me.”

Guadagnino agreed, noting the “mythic” quality of mentorship as both aspirational and doomed. Edebiri added her own lived experience: “Post-college, I felt like I didn’t have a mentor, and then when you do get one, there’s something that happens where you feel let down. But that’s part of the process—you grow beyond what you thought they held for you.”

The Pressure of Film

Faith Hug, a student journalist from the Leola Phoenix, asked how the cast maintained the pressure-cooker intensity of the story across multiple takes. Garfield answered with characteristic lightness: “With Luca, it’s really just one or two takes. If we’re feeling really bad at acting, maybe three. Shooting on film makes the space between action and cut sacred, a pressure that might just create a diamond.”

Edebiri emphasized Guadagnino’s “intentionality”: “Everything—from the art on the walls to what we’re doing with our hands—is in conversation. There’s an active thought behind it. That sense of intentionality and purpose is very helpful.”

Embodied Contradictions

Julia Roberts spoke about Alma less as an abstract character and more as a presence she had to carry around each day. Alma, she said, is someone always performing — a professor whose authority depends on posturing, on projecting confidence while quietly concealing her vulnerabilities. For Roberts, that constant calculation was the hardest part. “I’m just a much more wide-open, frank person,” she admitted, smiling at the contrast between herself and Alma’s guarded exterior.

That difference made the role both rewarding and exhausting. Roberts described the challenge of keeping track of Alma’s performance at all times — when to hold back, when to feign certainty, when to let something flicker through. She loved the work, but by the end of each shoot day, she was ready to “pack that away and go to bed.” It was a reminder that Alma’s contradictions weren’t just written on the page — they had to be lived in her body, and that took a toll.

What comes through is a character who is at once commanding and fragile, brilliant yet burdened by her own self-staging. Roberts didn’t frame Alma as someone to admire or condemn, but as someone to understand — a woman caught between openness and concealment, between her intellect and her exhaustion. In Alma, Roberts found not only a demanding role but also a study in what it means to live behind a mask.

The Value of Student Press

What stood out in the end was the presence of student journalists. Because After the Hunt takes place in higher education, its themes — privilege, mentorship, betrayal — felt less like distant concepts and more like realities Generation Z students navigate every day. When Nora Garrett described Yale’s cloistered privilege beside the city of New Haven, the point carried particular weight for an audience only a train ride away.

That closeness didn’t make the questions partisan, but it did make them personal. The roundtable demonstrated what student press can bring to cultural conversations: a perspective rooted in lived experience, presented with the curiosity and seriousness the setting warranted.