Lilli Keeve
Winning the Audience Choice Award at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and currently sitting at 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, Our Hero, Balthazar is a tragic, funny, and culturally important film with powerful commentary on the harmful nature of social media and how our digital age shapes young minds. Directed by Oscar Boyson and written by Boyson and Ricky Camilleri, the movie showcases the unique talents of its lead characters, Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and Solomon (Asa Butterfield).
The transcript below the video has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: I’m Lilli with Film Obsessive, and I am really excited to talk to you both today about your new film and congratulations on it. I watched it last night and absolutely loved it. It was dark, intense, heartbreaking, and just, I really, really enjoyed it. So congratulations. Balthazar and Solomon are from completely different worlds, yet they share so many similarities. What was the preparation process for molding these characters into real, authentic people without potentially having them come off as stereotypes?
Asa Butterfield: So for me, there was the sort of surface level, sort of accent and character that you see, and wanting to make sure I didn’t sound too overtly like Southern and I was chatting with Oscar and sharing my dialect coach and a lot of especially young sort of urban people who live in cities in Texas, their Texan accent isn’t the kind of thick Texan accent that you expect, especially as Brits, that you anticipate, anyone coming from Texas will sound like. So finding an authenticity there, and then speaking with Oscar about real references to young men who’ve been in similar positions to Solomon and have gone down pretty awful paths, and just trying to have some idea of of how that can happen, and where that sort of loneliness sits inside someone and can drive them to do these things, was a sort of strange journey down that rabbit hole.
Jaeden Martell: Yeah, for about the sort of, he’s always a caricature of himself. I remember having early conversations with Oscar, being like, “You know, do what you want.” We went and watched a Gregg Araki movie. It’s like, we’ll shoot it the way you know, that’s, it’s not too similar, but in terms of performance, it’s like, you can be campy a little bit. He never quite finds himself. So it’s, it’s, it’s always sort of false, in a sense.
I love Gregg Araki films. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers. So, during filming, were there any elements or realizations about your character that surfaced that maybe you hadn’t thought about before, or that felt kind of new or fresh?
Jaeden Martell: Well, I didn’t really know he was a bad guy. I thought he was the hero. The whole time that happened. That sucked. I was like, “Oh, guess he’s the bad guy, because nobody likes me. That’s fine.”
Asa Butterfield: I think we’re partially inspired by Ricky and Oscar’s, kind of like, like poking a bull. I felt like they were probing me with a hot poker. Sort of get these kind of magic moments out of Solomon and leaning into that slight unpredictability of him, and a bit of which is scary, but also can be quite funny, and it kind of landed all the kind of things we wanted people to feel watching this film, and that was quite a fun experiment.
That’s super cool and interesting. And so this film is pretty different, quite a diversion from the other projects you’ve done in your past. At this point in your careers, what other types of roles are you seeking or wanting to pursue?
Asa Butterfield: Well, I love playing this part. It felt like a real departure from things I’ve done before, but was a real challenge as an actor and really let me, or challenged me, to kind of feel things and then access different parts of myself and emotions that I don’t tap into as often, and and explore that and and figure out sort of why I find, why I found that hard previously, was a was an interesting kind of conversation that I had with my acting coach. And yeah, I just want to be able to explore more and show different sides to what I can do. And this was a movie that I was really excited about, because it let me do that.
Jaeden Martell: I think that’s always it. You’ve always want to find some kind of challenge in the next one. I just played like a kind of a monster/villain, which was really fun. Kind of like to know that I’m a, I’m the bad guy from the jump, and then sort of in and follow through with it, someone sinister, which is really fun. Now I want to play like a superhero. So give me, give me the call out here. I’m trying to be like, let me get me, get me to the gym and pay me for it, you know, tell me where to stand and put me behind a green screen. I think I would have fun with that.
Well, who knows, maybe Marvel will give you a call! That’s all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much again for taking the time to talk to me, and congratulations on the film. You both were really terrific.
