Pedro before Behemoth!

One of my lingering question marks for awards season is Behemoth!, the film about film composers written and directed by Tony Gilroy and starring Pedro Pascal. It premiered a couple weeks ago at the New York Film Festival to generally positive reviews, but so far, it doesn’t seem like it’s blowing people out of the water. Last night it screened at the BFI London Film Festival, though, so momentum is still building ahead of its December release date.

Pedro Pascal looks foxy as always:

And his sister, Lux Pascal, turned up, too:

With its collaboration of composers and putting music front and center, Behemoth! seems like an obvious contender for Best Original Score, but I continue to ponder Pedro’s odds in an unusually competitive year for Best Actor. Launching the film in December might be too late to consolidate momentum (statistically, late October is the sweet spot), especially when John Malkovich and Andrew Scott are taking up so much oxygen in the room already.

And I’m curious to see how it plays for Tony Gilroy, who used his Andor juice to get this movie made. Andor is an extraordinary work, but Gilroy’s career is rather up and down, with some all-time greats on his CV (The Cutting Edge, Michael Clayton, The Bourne Identity), and some all-time stinkers (Proof of Life, Duplicity). This happens over a career, of course, not everything will be a hit, and Gilroy DID co-wrote Armageddon, which is automatic legend status for Nineties action movies, but he’s mostly a franchise man. Bourne, Star Wars, his career is largely defined by big-budget action movies. I’m terribly curious to see if Behemoth! will be more Cutting Edge or The Devil’s Advocate, and how much Pedro Pascal can bail it out if it does fall on the Devil’s Advocate end of the spectrum.