Tanya Wexler’s crime comedy follows a Buffalo hustler who escapes her own debt by chasing other people’s, with Zoey Deutch as star and producer and a script by Brian Sacca, a writer from the Buffalo area.

Buffaloed is a crime comedy about a young woman who decides that the quickest way out of debt is to collect other people’s. Peg Dahl, played by Zoey Deutch, grows up in a poor, blue-collar family in Buffalo, New York, inherits her late father’s appetite for a hustle and plans her escape on paper: study economics, get into an Ivy League school, end up on Wall Street. Tanya Wexler’s film, written by Brian Sacca, follows what happens when that plan meets the price of tuition.

Buffaloed is a 95-minute American independent production. It had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 27, 2019, and was picked up shortly afterwards by Magnolia Pictures, which released it in select US theatres and on demand on February 14, 2020. In between, the film went home for a special screening at the Buffalo International Film Festival on October 13, 2019. Alongside Deutch, the cast includes Judy Greer, Jermaine Fowler, Noah Reid and Jai Courtney.

A hustle that starts with Bills tickets

Peg gets into a good college and cannot pay for it. Her solution is to sell counterfeit tickets to Buffalo Bills games, which works until it does not: she is caught and sentenced to forty months in prison. When she comes out, she is cleaning the toilets at the bar run by her brother, J.J. (Noah Reid), and carrying a pile of legal debt, exactly the kind of balance the city’s collection agencies chase by phone.

Her next move gives the film its premise. Instead of hiding from the collectors, Peg talks her way into the local firm that is chasing her and offers to work off what she owes. She turns out to be very good at the job, rises to the top of the floor and is then cheated by the owner, Wizz (Jai Courtney). At her brother’s bar she also meets Graham (Jermaine Fowler), who works for the district attorney’s office and is looking into the shadier corners of Buffalo’s debt-collection trade.

Armed with what she learns from him, Peg sets up her own agency, pitched as the legitimate alternative, and staffs it with fellow hustlers: phone-sex operators, small business owners, a fellow parolee. Her pitch to them is that collection is just sales, and that what they are selling is the relief of being free of the debt.

Success brings retaliation. Wizz moves from sabotage to threats that reach her family, from J.J.’s bar to her mother, Kathy (Judy Greer), a hairdresser who works off the books. The way Peg plays the final round, with the police, the rival agencies and a great deal of paper, is the part of the story best left to the film itself.

A Buffalo story written by a local

The screenplay was the first feature written by Brian Sacca, an actor and comedian born in Lockport, a small city in the Buffalo area, who went to the Nichols School in Buffalo itself. Audiences know him best as Robbie Feinberg, one of the brokers in Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and he also appeared in The Kings of Summer and the TBS comedy series Wrecked. On Buffaloed he is credited as writer and producer, and he plays a small part, Sal.

The local roots are written into the premise. Buffalo has long been described as one of the hubs of the American debt-collection industry, a world documented by journalist Jake Halpern in his 2014 non-fiction book Bad Paper, and the script builds its comedy out of recognisable pieces of the city: the Bills, a neighbourhood bar, a family that cannot afford to leave. Debt is not the backdrop of the story; it is the business that almost everyone in it is in, on one side of the phone or the other.

For all that, Buffaloed was not shot in Buffalo. Principal photography took place in Toronto, Canada, between July 24 and August 23, 2018. Zoey Deutch and Jermaine Fowler were announced that July, with Judy Greer joining in August. The production companies were Lost City, Bold Crayon Pictures and MXN Entertainment, and the producers were Mason Novick, John Finemore, Bannor Michael MacGregor and Jeff Katz, together with Sacca and Deutch.

Zoey Deutch as star and producer

Zoey Deutch came on board as both lead and producer. The daughter of actress Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch, she had built her career on comedies and teen films: Vampire Academy (2014), Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), Before I Fall (2017), the Netflix romantic comedy Set It Up (2018) and, in 2019, Ryan Murphy‘s series The Politician and Zombieland: Double Tap. Buffaloed gave her something different, a lead role in a story that follows its protagonist through every scheme from the first scene to the last.

The years since have confirmed that she likes characters who make questionable choices on purpose. She led the satire Not Okay (2022), about an influencer who fakes a trip to Paris, and Richard Linklater cast her again as Jean Seberg in Nouvelle Vague (2025), his film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

The supporting cast is built from familiar faces. Judy Greer, known for 13 Going on 30, Arrested Development and the 2018 Halloween, plays Peg’s mother. Jai Courtney, from A Good Day to Die Hard, Terminator Genisys and Suicide Squad, where he played Captain Boomerang, is Wizz. Jermaine Fowler, the co-star of the CBS sitcom Superior Donuts, plays Graham, and Noah Reid, Patrick in Schitt’s Creek, is J.J. Lusia Strus, Raymond Ablack, Lorrie Odom, Jonathan Langdon and Jayne Eastwood complete Peg’s world, with Kate Moyer as the young Peg.

Behind the camera

Tanya Wexler, born in Chicago in 1970, a Yale graduate with a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia University, made her feature debut with Finding North (1998) and followed it with Relative Evil (2001) and Hysteria (2011), a Victorian-era comedy with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy about the invention of the vibrator. Buffaloed was her first feature in eight years, and her next was the action comedy Jolt (2021) with Kate Beckinsale. Her films tend to put women at odds with the systems around them at the centre, and Peg fits that line neatly. Wexler is also the niece of the cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

The crew mixes Canadian independent cinema and studio experience. The cinematographer is Guy Godfree, who won the Canadian Society of Cinematographers award for Maudie, Casey Brooks edited the film, and the score is by Matthew Margeson, a composer from Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions whose credits include Rocketman and, with Henry Jackman, Kick-Ass 2 and the Kingsman films.

Buffaloed reached American screens on Valentine’s Day 2020, a month before the pandemic closed the country’s cinemas, and its theatrical run barely registered: around 25,000 dollars at the domestic box office, about 29,000 worldwide. It was released on demand the same day, which is where a film of this size usually meets its audience. More than six years later, it reads as an unusual combination, a comedy about money that takes the mechanics of debt seriously and a star vehicle that its star helped produce, and as one of the early lead roles that showed what Zoey Deutch wanted to do with her career.