Hollywood has a favorite way of laundering its accidents into destiny: the part one star walks away from becomes the role another was, in hindsight, born to play. Christine Vachon leaned all the way into that mythology at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, reframing the near-collapse of Todd Haynes’ De Noche not as a production catastrophe but as the detour that handed the film its ideal lead in Pedro Pascal.

Speaking in a career-spanning In Conversation moderated by Wendy Mitchell, who joked that she had come around to preferring Pascal to the film’s original star, Vachon, as Deadline reported, shot back: “I kind of do too!” She was warmer still on the finished performances: “He is certainly extraordinary in the film, and by the way, so is Danny [Ramirez]. I mean, both of them are a revelation.”

That original star was Joaquin Phoenix, who brought the project to Haynes and then exited in the summer of 2024, walking days before cameras were due to roll and taking the film down with him. Pascal stepped in roughly a year later, inheriting both the lead and a co-star who never left — Ramirez had stayed attached throughout — and turning an abandoned package back into a going concern.

For Haynes, De Noche is a return to the register that made Far From Heaven and Carol: desire boxed in by period and prohibition. For Vachon’s Killer Films it extends a lineage running from Boys Don’t Cry to May December. The sharper bet is on the talent side — Pascal, arguably at the most bankable moment of his career, is spending that capital on a frank, adult auteur romance financed through mk2 rather than on another franchise, with two Latino actors anchoring a studio-scale gay love story.

The film itself is a 1930s noir: Pascal’s hard-boiled detective and Ramirez’s boarding-school teacher fall into an affair as Los Angeles rots with corruption and the world tilts toward war, until the pair become targets and run for Mexico. Haynes shot it this spring in Guadalajara, with a release expected to follow in 2027. Which leaves the tidy irony Vachon was happy to sell in Edinburgh: the movie one leading man fled days before it began is now the one whose dailies made his replacement look like he had been waiting for it all along.

Tags: Pedro Pascal, casting, Todd Haynes, Danny Ramirez, De Noche