Paul Mescal is set to reunite with Jessie Buckley in Benh Zeitlin’s Hold On to Your Angels, with production scheduled to begin in February 2027.
The project, being introduced to buyers at the Cannes market during the 79th Cannes Film Festival, is produced by Plan B Entertainment alongside Alex Coco and will follow a hell-bound outlaw played by Mescal and a ferocious shepherd of lost souls portrayed by Buckley on the crumbling coast of South Louisiana.
The announcement leans on recent awards and nominations: Buckley won the Oscar for Best Actress at the 98th Academy Awards in March 2026 for Hamnet, and Mescal received a Lead Actor nomination in 2022 for Aftersun. Benh Zeitlin, who wrote and will direct Hold On to Your Angels, returns to feature filmmaking after first drawing global notice with Beasts of the Southern Wild, which was released in June 2012 and earned four Academy Award nominations in 2013.
Zeitlin described the new picture as an “impossible love story” — an outlaw romance staged at the endangered edge of America — and said he has imagined telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, wandered into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild 17 years ago. He framed the film as both a love letter to a vanishing way of life and a call for empathy across a fractured planet.
Plan B called Zeitlin’s early work “cosmic sorcery” that stunned audiences and the industry, and producers say they are backing his return to the Louisiana landscape and the blend of intense realism, myth and magic that marked his debut.
Context matters here: Buckley and Mescal were paired in Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about Agnes and William Shakespeare grappling with the death of their young son, and their reunion brings together two actors recently recognized by the Academy. Hold On to Your Angels is described as still in early development and has no release date, but the plan to court buyers at Cannes and then begin production in February 2027 sets a clear timetable for the next year.
That timetable is where the story tightens. The film is being shown to the market while it remains in early development and without a release date, meaning financiers and distributors will be asked in May 2026 to back a high-concept, climate-tinged romance built on Zeitlin’s singular voice and two actors whose star power has only recently been amplified by awards season. The juxtaposition — a marketplace pitch for a director who has not mounted a major new feature since Beasts of the Southern Wild and a project that leans on mythic, place-based filmmaking — creates a commercial test as well as an artistic one.
For Mescal, the immediate future is now mapped: he will re-team with Buckley and begin filming in and around Louisiana in February 2027 on a story that explicitly places its drama on the deteriorating coastline of South Louisiana. For buyers and audiences the question will be whether Zeitlin’s blend of realism and magic, coupled with the recent awards pedigree of his leads and the backing of Plan B Entertainment and Alex Coco, is enough to carry the film from the Cannes market to distribution and, eventually, screens.
The simple, unavoidable conclusion is this: Paul Mescal will reunite with Jessie Buckley on a Benh Zeitlin film whose production is scheduled for February 2027 in Louisiana, and the coming Cannes market will determine how quickly — and to whom — that reunion reaches theaters.
