Daisy Edgar-Jones cites admiration as her first draw to the buzzy TIFF film On Swift Horses . “I loved the producers behind the film. I love Call Me By Your Name and Nomadland so I was so excited about them taking this project on,” she says of Peter Spears and Mollye Asher while seated alongside her co-star Will Poulter in the middle of a busy press day at the Toronto Film Festival , where the film made its world premiere on Sept. 8.
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“And then I read the script, and I thought it was so beautiful and lyrical and just this kind of gorgeous exploration of love and self-discovery.” Her cherry on top? “When I found out the cast — Will, Jacob [Elordi] , Sasha [Calle] and Diego [Calva] — I was like this is such a cool opportunity to be in a period film with a really exciting young cast.”
Set in the 1950s, the film, adapted from author Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 book of the same name and directed by Halston and Fellow Travelers helmer Daniel Minahan, serves up a lot of coolness and style without sacrificing complexity. Edgar-Jones plays Muriel, a rural Kansas girl who is entangled emotionally between two men — her husband Lee (Poulter) and his brother Julius (Elordi). The two men, home from the Korean War, gather with Muriel at Christmas, in the home her mother purchased, a rare feat for a woman at that time. Although Muriel finally agrees to marry Lee, her fascination with Julius is immediately apparent, and she and Julius carry on a correspondence after she and Lee settle in San Diego.
Elordi’s Julius, who treats life as a gamble, doesn’t follow through on the new pact, opting for Las Vegas where he works at a casino. There, he begins a steamy affair with the dashing and cunning Henry (Diego Calva), who takes even bigger risks than he does. Drawn to the freedom she senses in Julius, Muriel, now working as a waitress, begins quietly making bets at the horse track. It’s a life she hides from her husband, along with her own secret same-sex desires, as they continue to pursue his American dream in California.
“Meeting Julius is such a pivotal moment in her life. She’s in a relationship with Lee. There’s a lot of love between them, but there’s something about Julius, his energy, that kind of breathes new life into her. I think she sees and recognizes a lot of herself in him and can’t quite articulate in her mind what that is,” explains Edgar-Jones, recently seen in the summer blockbuster Twisters alongside Glen Powell.
“Initially it’s just this sort of lightning moment of attraction and then throughout the story, she kind of pushes that further by taking back small moments of autonomy and strength [through] her gambling and winning this money and concealing it,” she adds. “There is a lot of love between Lee and Muriel. She really does love him, but not in the way that she wants to.”
Poulter sees Lee as both a man of his time and beyond it. “I think Lee represents, to a certain degree, one particular kind of pursuit of the American dream,” he observes. “He is a young man who is, I think, conforming to a lot of the societal expectations of that time, and has a heteronormative perspective on the world, and, in some respects, is quite limited as a result of that. I think that he also possesses, maybe beyond what lies on the surface, a slightly broader understanding of sexuality by way of his brother and the love that he has for his brother and understanding him and the fact that his brother isn’t afforded the opportunity to live truly as himself and live freely as a queer person. So his proximity to his brother, I think, allows him to have a slightly more textured understanding of Muriel’s exploration of her identity in respect to her sexuality.”
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Both credit their director for making the film’s 1950s setting and its limitations real to them. “It’s amazing when your director is your touchstone for just about anything you could possibly want,” says Poulter. “Dan was so incredibly well-researched and immersed in the period and everything that related to the complexities of the characters at that time, and particularly anything that related to the queer experience. As a gay man, he was able to lead in terms of how that should be represented with authenticity and dignity. I was a fan before and more so now.”
As British actors, both Edgar-Jones and Poulter say they didn’t feel out of step with the American themes either. “I grew up watching classic American movies and listening to the classic American music of that time too. So I didn’t feel it was too distant from me,” says Edgar-Jones.
“That ambition to want a better life for yourself, or to also want to live authentically, it’s a universal theme,” adds Poulter. “One of the beautiful things about the story as well is regardless of what journey you’re witnessing, there are relatable qualities to each and every person’s individual journey throughout the film.”
And both love the film’s optimism. “It doesn’t end with a complete bow on it. It feels like there’s more to it, that there’s a journey still to go on, but it really is hopeful,” Edgar-Jones shares.
Adds Poulter: “We’re reminding people of the reality of the journey for a lot of queer people being a lot more complicated and difficult, but not always ending tragically.”
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