Supernova, from writer-director
Harry Macqueen, will have its world premiere next week at the San
Sebastian Film Festival in Spain.
The film stars Colin Firth and Stanley
Tucci as a committed gay couple struggling with a diagnosis that
threatens to rip apart their relationship.
Firth, 60, and Tucci, 59, play Sam and
Tusker, respectively, a middle-aged gay couple who take a road trip
through England's Lake District as they digest Tusker's diagnosis
with young-onset dementia.
In an interview with Deadline,
both actors said that the film was about the love the characters
share, not their sexuality.
“It’s the simple fact of it being
two people who love each other, and it’s coming to an end, and the
fear of losing the person you love,” Firth
said. “It’s just these two people, but the setting being the
backdrop of the Lake District with its beautiful emptiness and vast
space contrasted with this tiny space they live in the van. It’s
just the two of them and it’s all down to one person’s feelings
for another. For all the considerations and controversies that might
surround the issues that the film addresses, in the end so many of
those issues are about love, and that’s what the entire focus of
this film is.”
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything
where it’s just about two people who love one another, and they
happen to be gay,” Tucci said. “Really, the story is about love,
and love is love. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay,
straight, whatever. Real love is all the same.”
The men said that their 20-year
off-screen friendship aided their performances.
Firth's portrayal of George Falconer, a
middle-aged professor struggling with the loss of his longtime lover,
in Tom Ford's A Single Man earned him an Oscar nomination. He
also played a gay character in the 2008 musical Mamma Mia!
Supernova premieres on September
23 at the San Sebastian Film Festival. A U.S. premiere date has not
been announced.