Tony Gilroy Needed a Sanctuary After Andor. In Behemoth!, Pedro Pascal Became His Exclamation Point

HOLLYWOOD — Tony Gilroy came out of Andor wanting somewhere to hide.

“I got what I wanted,” Gilroy said Friday night after AFI FEST’s screening of Behemoth! at the TCL Chinese Theatres. “I got a sanctuary. From the news for 18 months.”

That sanctuary was a film about the musicians who record Hollywood’s movie scores, and Gilroy’s first feature as a director since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy. By the end of the night, he had also made clear why it worked: the film’s riskiest, most fanciful ideas survived because of the actor at its center, Pedro Pascal.

Pascal plays Alex Serian, a gifted cellist and former child prodigy who returns to Los Angeles after two decades on the road and goes back to work in film-scoring sessions. Searchlight Pictures opens the film in theaters December 4.

The post-screening Q&A, moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s David Canfield, put Gilroy onstage with Pascal; Kaya Ralls, a professional cellist making her screen debut; producer and editor John Gilroy; and composers Emily Bear, Brandon Roberts and Nami Melumad, three of the nine members of the Behemoth! Collective. The Nerd Wire attended as credentialed press.

Leaving Andor behind

Gilroy said the idea had been on his desk for years. He researched it after Rogue One but couldn’t find a way in.

Then came five or six years of Andor, which he described as relentless from the shoot through the selling of the show and its second season. He called that stretch angry and aggressive, “so edgy all the time.”

Coming out of it, he said, the project he most wanted to get working was “that music movie.” When it finally came together, it became the hideout he had been looking for.

“I love music so much, and it was such a big part of my life when I was young, and I so badly wanted to do it,” he said. (Gilroy has told the Associated Press that he played guitar in bands and once hoped to become a Los Angeles studio musician.)

Filmmakers always wonder whether they can have a good time and still make a good movie, he told the room. “Because you know you can have a shitty time and make a good movie,” he said. “I’d done it and done it and done it.”

On Behemoth!, he said, “I never had a better time.”

Why it had to be a cello

Gilroy said the film started the way Michael Clayton did, with a place rather than a character. Clayton came from location scouting inside the back offices of law firms for The Devil’s Advocate. Behemoth! came from sitting in on scoring sessions and wondering why no one had made a movie about them.

He said he “knew it had to be the cello for a whole bunch of different reasons.” Part of it was the sound: he called the instrument “the octave of the human voice” and “foundation and diva.” Part of it was physical. A cello is “something you put between your legs,” he said, and also something players haul around on their backs wherever they go: “a being that you carry the fuck around all the time.” He acknowledged that didn’t fully explain the character, but said that was how he knew what he wanted.

That idea became his first instruction to his star. Pascal said Gilroy told him to take the cello everywhere, which put him “in physical relationship to something” from the start.

“I forgot I was playing a role”

Asked how hard it was to learn the instrument in the time he had, Pascal said, “It was very, very hard. It was impossible.”

Right after a lunch with Gilroy, before the green light was official on paper, Pascal called producer Sanne Wohlenberg and asked for the number of cellist Timothy Loo. From there, he said, it was lessons every single day.

He described the cello as a torso-sized instrument that sits between your legs and against your chest, one you have to take into your body like an embrace. Getting a beautiful sound out of it, and even learning to hold the bow correctly, felt close to impossible.

His first day of shooting put him on a bench beside Ralls. There was no cello playing in the scene, but Pascal admitted he was terrified.

“Maybe I practiced way too much cello,” he said. “I forgot I was playing a fucking role.”

He said the two of them stepped off the cliff together, and the scene became “an immediate dance and magic.” His relationship with the cello stayed love-hate for the whole shoot. “But I haven’t given her back yet.”

Later, Pascal called the technical challenge the hardest of his creative career, “incomparably so.” He has made similar comparisons elsewhere on this press tour, telling Vanity Fair and reporters at the London Film Festival that the cello was harder than his fight and stunt work. At AFI, he spent longer on a second challenge.

Alex is an intensely private character, Pascal said, yet the audience experiences the film through him. Alex is piecing memories together, and Pascal said anyone can relate to memories that help you “realize something, discover something or heal.” Playing that meant showing up fully present and vulnerable. Beyond the cello, he said, there was “a kind of naked thing” emotionally. He called it “scarily personal,” then caught himself: “God, I gotta stop talking.”

Music first, cameras second

On most films, the score is written largely in post-production, timed to an edit that is close to final. Music that characters perform on screen is usually prepared earlier so actors can play along on set, but that is typically a limited number of pieces.

Behemoth! is built out of on-screen music. Alex spends much of the film recording scores for fictional movies, and those sessions are what pull him into his memories. So most of the music had to exist before the cameras did.

“The pre-production had to be inverted,” John Gilroy said. About 80 or 90 percent of the music was written before principal photography, so the filmmakers could understand the movie and Pascal had time to learn the parts he would play. He said that sounds simple in a sentence but was a big deal. The early music also gave them confidence: “Wow, this movie might work.”

Roberts, who scored the second season of Andor, said Tony Gilroy first raised the idea while they were deep in that season. Once everyone read the script, he said, they saw how complicated it would be. Writing everything beforehand, then factoring in an actor learning the cello, made the logistics “unbelievable.” He called it “once in a lifetime,” partly because session musicians the composers have known for decades finally get “their moment in the sun.”

Bear said her invitation sounded so improbable that she assumed it was a targeted phishing email. She asked her agent, “Is this a scam?” His answer: “Honestly, it might be.” Once she read the script, she said, she saw how the music worked; the approach “shouldn’t work, but it does.” Her piece of the film’s music was “very romantic, very lush.”

Melumad wrote the film’s harp cues for a specific performer, harpist Gayle Levant, who appears in the film and has recorded on a long list of movie scores. She said part of the challenge was writing before there was any picture to write to.

The last step reversed the process. Until the end, Tony Gilroy said, the score existed as demos and synth mock-ups. Then all the composers came in with their conductors for five or six days of sessions at Sony to “humanize the whole score.” With the film playing on the screen, about half the orchestra recording it was also in the movie, playing along to scenes of themselves.

One piece of music, Gilroy said, couldn’t be engineered. “Something magic has to happen,” he said. After several attempts, longtime collaborator James Newton Howard “cracked it.” Having that music in hand gave him the confidence to hold back on close-ups where people on set expected them. “We had enough confidence, stupid confidence,” he said. “We had the music.”

A musician learns to act

Teaching two actors to play an instrument was hard enough, Gilroy said; “it’s a lot easier to teach musicians how to act.” Many of the players on screen are working session musicians, some of whom he has known for 20 years, and he credited casting director Carmen Cuba and music contractor Timothy Loo with building a deep bench.

Ralls came through the same network. She said Loo, whom she knew only slightly, “saw an Instagram reel of me playing cello” and recommended her to casting. She auditioned on Zoom while spending the summer at the Tanglewood Music Center, met Gilroy briefly on a Zoom callback and didn’t meet anyone in person until camera tests about a week before shooting. It was her first time on a film set.

Her first scene partner was Pascal, which she called “very surreal, very crazy,” though she said the team made it fun. Ralls is pursuing a master’s degree at Juilliard, and Pascal noted that the Mozart recorded in the film is hers. She said her musicianship carried over into acting: being present, listening, being empathetic and wanting to share parts of yourself. She called the experience “tremendously enriching.”

The exclamation point

Canfield closed by asking Gilroy about Pascal carrying every scene.

Tone is the hardest thing to get right, Gilroy said, and he has watched friends and enemies crash on it. The Behemoth! script has places he knew he could “shake down” and make more realistic, at the risk of the whole thing drying up.

He didn’t want to. “I want the movie to have pixie dust,” he said. “It’s a fairy tale inside this movie.” He wanted the film to carry Alex away, a little out of control. “I want to make an Italian movie.”

Great acting gets you most of the way, Gilroy said, but a lead who carries the whole film needs something deeper. Early in his first meeting with Pascal, he realized: “I have my exclamation point.” Sadness was the easy part, he said. Pascal also had “all this fizz and all this charm.”

That meant the strange parts could stay. “I didn’t have to shave down any parts that I was afraid of,” Gilroy said. “I could leave them there.” He could go to his crew the next day and say, “I want my fairy tale snowstorm. I want it to be insane.” A princess, a dead queen, a cuckolded king, a minstrel walking in circles with a thorn in his foot.

“We can do all that shit now,” he said, “because we have this fucking guy who can deliver it.”

Pascal showed up every day, Gilroy said, and “he legitimized that exclamation point for me.”

Behemoth! opens in theaters December 4 from Searchlight Pictures. Follow The Nerd Wire’s full AFI FEST 2026 coverage.

Photos: Katrina Lee / The Nerd Wire