How two young filmmakers — with help from Robbie Rogers and, in a roundabout way, Charlie Davies — created the year’s most penetrating documentary portrait and provided a long-lost English/NASL standout a new lease on life.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Two inexperienced filmmakers, new in town with no significant credits to their name, stumble upon an old guy sitting on the balcony of an abandoned motel and ask him what’s up.
That old guy turns out to be Tony Powell — a top-tier English defender and NASL alum who hung up his boots four decades ago and promptly vanished — and this is the germinal moment in this season’s most rewarding film about the game, and one of the finest in any era.
“The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel” arrives a most unexpected gem. Directors Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman possessed no overarching design when they walked from their West Hollywood digs to the dilapidated, titular motel two blocks away — they were just looking to broaden their portfolios — and slowly found themselves weaving a tragic and inspiring tale of fear and shame, of identity and bigotry and desertion, of resignation and, ultimately, redemption.
The resulting documentary, a product of partnerships built on the soccer field and within a loose community of influential gay filmmakers — and available to watch on AppleTV, Prime Video, and Fandango — provides a poignant, unflinchingly sober profile of a brutally flawed man unable to reconcile the life he’d lived with who he was and so left behind everything he’d been and done as he stepped from the closet into the embrace of Los Angeles’ queer epicenter.
Petros and Freeman wouldn’t know for some time what they’d found, what it would ultimately lead to, what would be required to penetrate Powell’s steely armor, nor how to get any of that onto the screen, but what they’ve concocted — made possible by Robbie Rogers’ partnership with a veteran producer he’d met through former U.S. teammate Charlie Davies — is a penetrating, multilayered and hugely entertaining run through a cascade of revelation over a two-year span.
“Last Guest” has won widespread raves — in its debut at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, along the festival circuit, during a two-month engagement at Los Angeles’ most adventurous independent art house, in its streaming premiere, and now as it wraps up a resonant theatrical tour of Britain — and a bit of Oscar buzz while transforming the lives of its protagonist and of those telling the tale.
“From small seeds,” Petros noted, “grow great trees.”
Here’s how it happened.
‘A little three-minute project’
Petros moved to Los Angeles in late 2022 to be near the heart of the film world. Zillow directed him to an affordable place in West Hollywood, and he invited Freeman to drop by. It was “the dead of winter in New York, when everyone wants a reason to leave,” he said. “I was like, ‘Hey, Nick, why don’t you come out for a month and check out L.A.?’ ”
The Writers Guild strike was on the horizon — it would arrive in May, lasting until October — and so nothing much was happening. No work to pursue. No real opportunities looming for newcomers to carve out a space within the industry. Petros and Freeman concentrated on those portfolios.
“In our industry, you want stuff to show people,” Petros told Soccer America. “We were, like, ‘We’d really love to get commercials. Let’s try to make a really commercially viable piece to try to get more work.’ It was just gonna be the two of us, we were pooling resources, it was gonna be as cheap as we can do it.”
Nearby stood the Holloway Motel, something of an institution on Santa Monica Boulevard — half-block east of La Cienega, just beyond WeHo’s “Rainbow District” (a k a “Boystown”) — and closed since the COVID pandemic. Population? One. Two, really: Powell, who’d managed the place for more than two decades, and his beloved Chihuahua, Samantha.
They could be seen every day sitting on the balcony just above the sidewalk, drink in hand, laptop computer at his command. Petros would walk by “every other day.” Powell and Sam were always there.
“Ramiel had been kind of clocking him on the balcony and wondering what might be going on, why he was there in this abandoned motel,” Freeman explained. “And he had this incredible instinct to see if we wanted to go shout up at him and see what was going on.
“So we gathered the courage together, and we both went over, and we shouted up at him.”
Powell told them, Petros said, “that the city had purchased the motel, it was becoming an interim housing program [for homeless], and that he had to leave.” They thought it might make a nifty short, a “little three-minute project that was going to be done within a month.” A portrait of “this motel manager who was running this abandoned motel, who was being evicted.” They thought “the end of the movie was him moving out.”
It was a West Hollywood tale then, as much about the Holloway Motel as the man running the place. The Holloway could tell many tales. It had been around since the 1920s, at first a bungalowed Route 66 motor court welcoming travelers to L.A., then renovated in the 1950s into a proper motel. It faded over time from a bustling tourist stopover into a seedy, somewhat functional, increasingly anything-goes residential space.
The Holloway was affordable, for sure, along a stretch of L.A. that mostly wasn’t. It also was iffy. Drugs? Sure. Hookers? Oh, yeah; cops once busted down a door in a trafficking raid. VICE Magazine profiled it 11 years ago in “A Tour of Hollywood’s Creepiest Motels”: “Like the mother in ‘Psycho,’ the Holloway Motel looks nice from the back, but it’s eerie from the front.”
TripAdvisor ranked it 20th among 20 WeHo motels in 2020, its user reviews over the previous decade or so depicting the place as a “filthy,” “downright frightening” “dumpster,” a “roach motel” that “should be reported to the health department.” The “perfect place if you want to stay in a sewer.” A “complete hassle.” The “house of gloom.” The “third ring of Hell.” The “WORST stay ever!!!”
“You’d be better served to stab yourself continuously in the eye,” one poster penned. Another asked: “How is this place still in business?”
Powell? He was, reviews claimed, a “terribly rude manager,” an “insulting” and “very dangerous freak” who was “belligerent and obviously looking to do battle,” would tell customers to “go fuck yourself,” and promised one that “he is coming to my hometown [to] KILL ME.”
There were a few positive reviews, too. One thanked the Holloway for “the most fantastic stay,” called Powell “so lovely,” described the room as “spotlessly clean” and “very modern,” and gave it five stars. No “/s” followed.
The pandemic brought it all to an end, and the motel sat unoccupied from that point, Powell and Sam aside. The City of West Hollywood received a $6 million state grant in June 2022 to purchase and renovate the building into transitional housing, and Powell was awaiting his eviction papers when Petros and Freeman asked him what’s up.
Powell, then 75, had been in West Hollywood since calling it quits on a 16-year soccer career that had taken him from nonleague Bath City FC to AFC Bournemouth to Norwich City FC and on to the North American Soccer League’s last, waning era before its mid-1980s demise. He’d been a hard-nosed defender, a good one, a “tough guy,” “assertive” and “reliable.” Something of a Norwich legend: never left the field, tormented opposing attackers, club MVP one season.
He also was gay. Deeply closeted gay.
He knew the landscape. Football, hardly an outlier in Western society, was a most homophobic space, no use for “poofs” and “fairies,” and the idea one might reveal such a secret was beyond ridiculous. Career suicide. Perhaps worse: Justin Fashanu, Powell’s gloriously talented Norwich City teammate for a stretch, would in 1990 become the first openly gay pro in the game, prompting a severe backlash — inside and outside the lines — and he was driven, ultimately, to suicide.
Powell left for America in 1981, spent a couple of seasons with the San Jose Earthquakes and another with the Seattle Sounders — played on their indoor teams, too — then retired at 36. Then he disappeared, escaping into WeHo’s queer scene, cutting all contact with family, friends, compadres, never to be seen again.
That was how it was supposed to play out till the end of his days, until Petros and Freeman approached the Holloway’s balcony overlooking bustling Santa Monica Boulevard. One brief conversation would change all three of their lives.
🎞️ THE LAST GUEST OF THE HOLLOWAY MOTEL
LD Entertainment, 2025/26
Directors: Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman
Producers: Robbie Rogers, Andrew D. Corkin, Mickey Liddell, Pete Shilaimon, Beau Ward
Executive Producer: Greg Berlanti
🍿Watch it: AppleTV, Prime Video, Fandango
‘We left him a note, and he ignored us’
Petros and Freeman, born a month and a continent apart in 1997, possessed similar aims, unquestionable talent, and a spot within one of the most productive pipelines into their profession. They became friends as their studies ended at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, home to the finest film school in the country, one counting Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Oliver Stone, Sean Baker, Chloé Zhao, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Lonergan, Ang Lee, Susan Seidelman, Dee Rees, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Willem Dafoe and Charlie Kaufman among alumni.
“We were in the same thesis class, where you spend your senior year working on your own projects in a cohort group. That’s where we met,” Petros said. “When we were in class together, I don’t know that we spent that much time together. It’s after we graduated [in 2019], we were the only two people editing on the editing floor at NYU. We’d be working away in our private rooms, both editing our own short films. And then we would come out and chitchat when we got sick of working.
“Eventually, just by the nature of us being the only two people there, I’d be like, ‘Hey, can you come watch this?’ We just kind of started giving each other notes and helping each other out on our projects.”
Freeman would “help Ramiel shoot something, and he’d help me produce something, and we sort of had a bit of an unofficial creative friendship collaboration going.”
Petros, a child of Iraqi immigrants who grew up in the Bay Area, not far from San Jose, would go on to make his second and third short films — all three online, all worth tracking down — produced another short, and found jobs in production support for a film and two TV series. Freeman, who grew up in Connecticut’s “commuter suburbs” an easy train ride from New York City, worked on commercials and music videos, shot one of Petros’ shorts, and began building a career as director, editor and cinematographer. “Sort of a one-man band on a lot of these jobs.”
That they ended up in L.A. might be expected. Yeah, the timing sucked, but meeting Powell opened unexpected doors, and they were fortunate he agreed, with some prodding, to play along.
“We left him a note, and he ignored us,” Petros said during a Q&A following the opening-night screening at the Lumiere Cinema in Beverly Hills’ historic Music Hall, which sits a little less than two miles southwest of the Holloway. “And then we ran into him outside the Fiesta Cantina having a margarita at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday. ‘What about that note?’ And he said, ‘OK, fine, you can do it.’ ”
The simple short turned into something far grander as Petros and Freeman quizzed Powell on his past, a subject that hardly enthused him, and started their due diligence. They connected with him, for real, after he invited them to his motel digs.
“We go over, and he serves us drinks,” Freeman said. “Ramiel was scared to drink his drink, thought it was spiked. I was so trusting, and I drank both of the margaritas. And I had the best time ever.”
Powell had mentioned he’d played soccer, not much more than that. “We were kind of like, ‘OK, sure,’ you know?” Petros said. “We all played the sport, I guess.”
Freeman’s relationship with soccer was negligible, but Petros’ father was mad about the game, and it was, Petros said, “big in our family, whether I wanted it or not. I don’t know that I loved soccer as much as [everyone else], but all three of us — me and my sisters — were put in soccer as soon as we were 5 years old. Some of us opted out sooner than others. I think I played for three or four years.”
Football meant everything to Powell, a West Country boy, from Bristol, who adored his parents, wanted most of all to make them proud, and did so on the pitch. He was a stud, an excellent athlete, an amateur boxer in his youth, tall and lean and courageous, a keen talent. He grew up within local club Lawrence Weston Boys, tested himself against older players with National Smelting FC, then moved into his first paying job with Bath City, playing in the sixth-tier Southern League Division One.
Bournemouth, then a Third Division club, came calling in 1968, when Powell was 21. He’d play in 258 matches across six and a half seasons with the Cherries before following manager John Bond to Norwich City during the 1974-75 campaign. He helped the Canaries to the League Cup final and promotion to the First Division — what now is the Premier League — in his first season with the club.
Powell was “very dependable, very robust,” his teammate Kevin Bond, John’s son, notes in the film. Winger John Ryan: “Off the field, he was a gentle guy. On the field, he was a monster. What he had was heart, courage, commitment. He was hard as nails.” John Bond, in a contemporary column for the Norwich Evening Post, called Powell “one of those footballers who does not get the headlines, yet to me, he is a dream player … the sort that every manager wants in his side.”
Bond made Powell a backline centerpiece at Norwich City, and a three-year, 148-game, iron-man run across all competitions established the 6-foot-2 center back as a club icon. He was there seven years, voted by fans the Canaries’ player of the year in 1979, then followed the manager out the door, departing in 1981 for the NASL, after 275 matches, when Norwich City slid into the Second Division.
He joined an Earthquakes team that featured George Best and Wolves legend Phil Parkes, played alongside Wim Suurbier, Leo Cuellar and Chris Dangerfield in his second season, then with Brian Schmetzer under Laurie Calloway with the Sounders in 1983. He started most games, but his teams didn’t fare well, a combined 36-58 and no playoff appearances.
Then he was gone.
‘Whoa, that sounds really interesting’
There was a lot more here than just the Holloway Motel. How deep the well, Petros and Freeman couldn’t know, nor whether the guarded but caustically amusing Powell, who responded to incisive queries by calling them “nosy bitches,” would be willing or able to dig such depths. But they knew they had a subject with a wicked wit, a story that could be something special, and that they needed surer hands to guide them, industry insiders who understood how this works and what it takes to get this done, who had the means to make it happen.
Their research alerted them to Rogers, the former Major League Soccer standout, U.S. Olympian and national-teamer who had come out in 2013 while with Leeds United, retired as he made the announcement — he thought it untenable to play professionally as an acknowledged gay man — then returned to the game within months, with his hometown LA Galaxy.
Rogers was the first openly gay top-flight pro since Fashanu, was grandly celebrated as such, and — what luck! — had leapt from the soccer field into the entertainment industry, as a film and television writer/producer, aided somewhat by his husband, revered director/producer Greg Berlanti. Petros and Freeman sent Rogers an email, through his agent.
“We were just making a short film, and we are very content to make a short film,” Petros said. “We reached out just to let him know about the story, to ask if he could maybe help us.”
They provided the gist of the tale, that “there was a bit more going on” than what they’d uncovered, and hoped, at the least, that Rogers could arrange pro-bono access to shoot inside the Galaxy’s stadium down in Carson. He offered far more.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, that sounds really interesting’ …,” said Rogers, who was in post-production on the acclaimed Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated miniseries “Fellow Travelers” when the pitch arrived. “That’s when I jumped on, and mainly because I really just wanted to know Tony’s story and be part of [telling] how does someone go from being a professional footballer at Norwich City to becoming manager of a motel that I have walked by, I don’t know, every other day when I lived in West Hollywood. And how he became almost homeless.”
Rogers had just met Andrew D. Corkin, a veteran producer with extensive experience in narrative films and documentaries, and he immediately made contact “because it’s not my space, making documentaries, and he’s much better and knows more about that than I do.”
Corkin, also an NYU Tisch alum — so are Kat Vokes, who composed the music for “The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel,” and Gabriel Connelly, one of the film’s directors of photography — connected with Rogers through Davies, a skillful striker whose international career ended in a horrific 2009 car crash. Corkin had known Davies “tangentially” when they were wrestlers at rival prep schools in Boston’s suburbs in the early 2000s. (Davies, he said, “was really good; like, he was an All-American wrestler. If it wasn’t for soccer, he could have had a different collegiate career, in wrestling.”)
Corkin followed Davies’ soccer career, from Boston College to Europe, then hooked up with him to produce “The Unrelenting Charlie Davies,” a short documentary for MLS —debuting in April 2016 on ESPN SportsCenter — about the striker’s resurgence following the accident and his ensuing struggles to regain fitness, form and confidence. They had grown close.
“Fast forward to 2020 or so, when I moved to L.A.,” Corkin said. “Charlie tells me, ‘You need to meet my close friend from my soccer days, Robbie Rogers.’ ”
They finally got together, after COVID died down, as Corkin was finishing post-production on his 2022 Netflix documentary series “Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?”
“I get a call from Robbie,” he said, “and he said, ‘This is sort of out of left field; I don’t know what I’m looking at.’ … I said, ‘Send over the materials, I’m happy to take a look,’ and that was the initial teaser and deck [the latter a highly visual, usually slide-based presentation used to pitch a project’s story, tone, budget, and artistic vision] for ‘The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel.’
“I watched it, I read it, and I said to Robbie, ‘I think there’s something here.’ ”
Corkin, whose filmography includes lauded narratives “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” “We Are What We Are” and “Wild Canaries,” proposed they “partner up and work with these kids.” It was, essentially, “welcome to the industry.”
“It just shows,” he said, “how serendipitous life becomes.”
They sat down with Petros and Freeman, and Corkin was blunt, telling them “that there wasn’t that much of an appetite on my end, or Robbie’s, to be a part of a short doc,” but that “we just knew that there was so much more hiding under the surface.” Finding it would take time and money.
“They’re these young filmmakers operating just with their own camera, with no money to spend,” Corkin said. “We think there could be more here ‘if we helped you raise some money and fund a little bit to get going.’ That the more they sat down with Tony, the more trust they [gained] with him, the more he would open up. It became this self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Freeman says Rogers and Corkin “started opening up their Rolodex,” clearing pathways to make everything happen. It led to Berlanti coming on as executive producer and a deal with LD Entertainment, a production company run by Berlanti’s former business partner Mickey Liddell, who has a producer credit.
“Ramiel and I have no major credits and no major connections so early in our career,” Freeman said. “They were completely pivotal in being able to get this project in front of people who would care about it. The rest was seamless. They were able to pull the funding together, and we were off to the races from there.”
Immense patience would be required to get what they needed from Powell. He wasn’t one to muse on the past, wasn’t always honest, resisted efforts to dig into his memories. Had no interest in revisiting his foibles, and he’d made some egregious errors. What had happened four decades earlier and through the time that followed was locked away.
As a short film about the motel and his departure, Petros noted during a conversation for NYU Tisch’s website days after the film’s Tribeca debut. “there wasn’t an expectation that we would be going so deep into his life. I don’t think on day one he would have agreed to do a feature.”
“Tony was a very interesting participant to have,” Freeman, who like Petros had no documentary experience, told Soccer America. “When you’re going in to make a documentary, you don’t want someone who is completely forthcoming. You don’t want someone who wants to be in a documentary, per se. Not that Tony didn’t want to be in a documentary, but he wasn’t necessarily ready on day one to talk about his estranged family or to even talk about this notion of reuniting with them.”
Corkin said the first time he and Rogers met with Powell, with Petros and Freeman at their side, was at a “little bar” one morning near the Holloway.
“We all got iced teas. Tony got [an alcoholic] drink,” he said. “Tony was just very closed off, and at the time he wouldn’t even acknowledge that he was gay. Robbie and I were trying to really show, like, ‘Hey, this is a safe space with us,’ but it was very clear that this was going to be an uphill battle in terms of getting him to open up, and we all came away from that meeting, like, is this going to work out? Is this person going to give us what we’re looking for from him?”
Rogers could relate.
“Tony was very much a closed book, and I think even to this day he doesn’t totally understand how traumatic parts of his life were,” he said. “I understand why. I understand keeping that side of you [inside]. Even with the people that are very accepting of him being a gay man here in West Hollywood, he was still a mystery to them, because he kept so much of that to himself.
“He’s a closed book. He opens it for a second, then he closes it again.”
‘Keep it to yourself and pretend to be one of the boys’
Powell was happy to talk about certain things. Samantha (“She’s my daughter”). His playing days (“He was very proud of his career as a soccer player; that was really easy for him,” Petros said.) What was going on right then, the coming move, how much he was going to miss the Holloway, his affection for Southern Comfort. Everything else surfaced over time.
“Early on, he opened up about being gay, and West Hollywood is a famous gay cultural hub, so it’s not that much of a leap to say, ‘Well, you’ve lived here for 40 years, why do you love this place?’ ” said Petros, who also is gay. (Freeman is straight.) “That was something that I think was strange for him to talk about on camera, because he had never acknowledged being a closeted soccer player before.
“He considered himself a gay man who was a motel manager with a soccer-career past that he was really comfortable with. I think the film ends up becoming something much bigger when you [get] into the part about his life that he ran away from and ignored. It took months and months of us getting to know Tony before he was comfortable even diving into that.”
So much occurred in those months, in early 2023, enabling that to happen, starting with Powell’s housing needs and his trepidation on what to do. Petros and Freeman were around all the time, hanging out, shooting at the motel, building a rapport, and they helped to guide him through an apartment search. Slowly, they gained his confidence. They merely hint at most of this in the documentary, focusing primarily on Powell’s and Sam’s move. That itself was a challenge.
“Tony lived in England for 35 years and lived in West Hollywood for 45,” Petros said in the Lumiere Q&A. “When he had to get ready to leave, we were trying to help him find a place, and we’d be, like, a mile out of West Hollywood. He’d be like, ‘I don’t want to look at it.’ I think he felt like it was the first place where he was, like, ‘I can have a home.’ ”
WeHo had been, Powell says in the film, “somewhere I can be myself and not run around hiding.” He’d been hiding nearly all of his life. He’d realized he was gay in his teens and buried that deep inside. Didn’t want to disappoint his parents, never wanted to lose his family’s love and admiration. Knew he couldn’t play football if others knew his secret. He was trapped, so he played the “game.” Got married, unhappily. Fathered two daughters. Respected in his profession and in his community. Went along as if everything were normal, as if he were “normal.” An endless chore.
“I hated it,” he told The Guardian last winter. “I just wanted to be who I am, but at that time it was not a good idea to come out.” He had to, he says in the film, “keep it to yourself and pretend to be one of the boys.” In that, he succeeded.
“He’d play game after game after game after game. He was big personality,” his Norwich City teammate Mick McGuire said. “Then he went to America, and never heard from him anymore.”
“When I came to the U.S.,” Powell told The Guardian, “it was like setting myself free in lots of ways.”
He paid a heavy price. Fearful his family would reject him if they knew he was gay, that they would be ashamed of him, that he would be ostracized, he erased everything that had come before, left all he knew behind. It was, his sister Denise Smith told the filmmakers, “like he was wiped off the face of the earth.”
Powell remained closeted during his NASL adventure, then answered West Hollywood’s call as soon as he hung up his boots. The city, until 1984 a swath of unincorporated Los Angeles County nestled mostly just northeast of Beverly Hills, had been a gay mecca for decades. Since the prohibition era, and especially among Hollywood’s gay elite. It was a relatively friendly confine just beyond the border with Los Angeles proper, which until the 1950s was a mob-run den of vice and corruption in which homosexuals were targeted for extortion and entrapment.
WeHo became something of a refuge after the iron-fisted, syndicate-busting William H. Parker’s 1950 ascension to LAPD chief and the draconian vice raids targeting “sexual perversion” that followed. It would find its identity as a buoyant gay epicenter in the post-Stonewall landscape of the 1970s as more gays arrived, mostly men, and the “Boystown” culture grew amid queer clubs and shops.
“[I came] because it was gay,” Powell told The Guardian. “People go to West Hollywood because they feel safe. They move from places where they’re getting harassed to somewhere they can live freely.”
He found connections. Met the love of his life, then nursed his lover as he succumbed to AIDS. He ended up at the Holloway, “just another guy on the street, looking for a job,” about a decade later.
Back home in England, he was a ghost. His sisters heard he’d died. Norwich City’s attempts to track him down ahead of its 2002 centenary celebration went nowhere. He was, one scribe wrote, “probably the most untraceable ex-footballer there is.”
Then the British tabloids got a scoop: Powell was living as a woman in San Francisco, and they “proved” it with a photo of him in drag, taken years earlier at a dress-up party he’d attended with his father. It caused quite a stir. News of the World called him “a big fairy,” said Fashanu likely “awakened” his “gay tendencies.” It was ugly stuff, typical tabloid nonsense.
A local reporter, in Bristol, also tracked Powell down, found him managing the Holloway, and he contacted Smith, who passed along a message. There was no response.
“I did call the hotel, and I’m sure it was him who answered the phone,” she told the BBC as the film opened last month in England. “He just said, ‘There’s no Tony Powell who works here.’ ”
She and her older sister, Jane Stiddard, sent Powell a letter, old photos included to confirm that, yes, this was them. He again ignored them, even as his closest friends —his assistant manager, whom Powell had supported through her gender transition, and a young employee he’d befriended— begged him to respond.
“We tried,” Smith said. “I guess he just wasn’t ready to be found.”
They’d not connect for another two decades.
‘That’s what I am, a bloody mess’
Petros’ and Freeman’s relationships with Powell evolved through a series of ordeals, largely dealing with Powell’s and Sam’s health. The prospect of maybe reuniting with the family he’d left behind emerged from this.
“Trust is the biggest thing when it comes to his ability to start talking about things that he has buried for 30 or 40 years,” Freeman noted in the NYU Tisch conversation. “Right when we figured out this was going to be a feature, it coincided with the time that he was getting evicted from the motel, so we were just thrust into that with him. We were capturing it, but we were trying to help him figure it out a bit. And it was quite a stressful situation that happened over the course of, like, two months, [and] that was a crucial period of building trust.
“At a certain point, we just kind of became pals with him. He turned from this intimidating motel manager who had a baseball bat to chase out vagrants and became a bit of a softy.”
Finding the right balance between the job and the friendship — an ethical quandary for all documentarians — and doing the right thing within that isn’t always simple. There are no stringent guidelines.
“I think it came naturally,” Petros told Soccer America. “Sometimes documentaries, at least the way you hear people talk about them, is this approach where the director shouldn’t be involved. The camera is just a viewer. No interference. I found pretty early on that as soon as you’ve placed a camera on someone, and they’re aware about it, that they start behaving differently. I think there’s this misconception that you can document someone without the documentary influencing how they behave.
“The thing that was our guiding force here is it was so important to us that we do it truthfully and honestly, and also respectfully. We wanted every person [we interviewed] to walk away and not feel like they had made up what they said. Things like that are so important to us, that this was honest, and that we were getting all perspectives. I think, because we had a close relationship, it actually made it more possible to do that, because people were more comfortable about talking to us about really complicated things, because they knew we weren’t going to misrepresent what they were intending to say.”
It also made it possible to confront Powell when necessary, providing “the opportunity for us to challenge Tony when he needed to be challenged, when he wasn’t telling the truth.”
“Early in the filmmaking process, when we didn’t have that trust, if he said something to us that we felt was untrue, or that we knew was untrue, we didn’t really have the relationship to be able to call him on it,” Petros said. “And there’s a moment in the film where later, once we’ve built that trust, that we can maybe push back at things that don’t make sense. And I think there’s a really honest moment that Tony finally has on camera that is the result of us having that trust between each other.”
It’s the second of two particularly incisive moments in “Last Guest” — related to Powell’s abrupt estrangement from his family, his children, for ignoring their entreaties — in which Petros and Freeman force him to dig deeper, call him on his bullshit, and these serve as triggers into the third act and the redemption that miraculously awaits.
Powell is a complex and deeply flawed man shaped by trauma, by the mask he’s had to wear, the lie he’s had to live, the fear that has engulfed him, the pain that all of that engenders, and, more than anything, the dark path that awaited should his secret escape. Burying the past was refuge.
“I don’t look back, and some of the things that have probably happened, I don’t remember,” Powell explains when he finally looks inward. “I put them out of my memory. I don’t want to remember. … I always felt, like, shut the fuck up, get on with your life, and you don’t talk about it. That’s what I’ve done most of my life.
“That’s what I am, a bloody mess.”
One of the great charms of “The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel” is how the story is told, how it unfolds, how the tools of filmmaking are used within that. Petros and Freeman offer a masterclass in construction, peeling away rings of the onion, if you will, one after another, to reveal greater dimensions within Powell and the narrative.
That has much to do with approach — they’re “narrative” filmmakers, had never considered making docs, and they wanted the film to flow, to blossom, as would a fictional “narrative” — and also to do with the organic process. What we see and learn mirror the filmmakers’ experience, the knowledge and understanding they build over 16 months following Powell. Nobody knew how things would play out, how the film would end. Bitter, sweet, a bit of both?
“In a narrative film, you know what happens on the last page of the script,” Corkin said. “We had no idea what the last page of our script was gonna be on this one.”
The journey follows its own path. Revelations pile up deep into the closing credits. That they gathered the tale had much to do with fortune. That it’s a thrilling ride is about Petros’ and Freeman’s skill.
“I think there was a lot of serendipity in when we met Tony,” Petros said. “He was going through a significant change in his life. He was leaving his home. He was navigating [some life-altering occurrences]. There was so much happening in a short period of time that I think he was a lot more open to something that he wouldn’t have been five years ago had we met him then. I think a big part of this journey was as we were getting to know him and understanding him, we didn’t know his family was still alive. We didn’t know that he had daughters or that he’d been married. As it’s being revealed in the film is how we learned it.
“I think the longer the process went on where we were filming, where he could open up and there wasn’t judgment from us, I think that helped him change so much during the process. That he could be truthful without the fear that we would just tell him, ‘OK, we’re never going to talk to you again. You’re a terrible person.’ I think that is how it just kept unfolding into a bigger and bigger story, because he was taking these bigger leaps that he hadn’t thought he was able to do before.”
He and Freeman pursued “curiosity without judgment.”
“It was trying to understand the why as opposed to the ‘answer for this,’ ” Petros said. “We tried to introduce you to Tony as we met him, and so that maybe by the time you find out about his mistakes, you’re seeing him as a whole person as opposed to judging him for his worst actions.”
Powell’s transformation during production was a vital component.
“Tony grew a lot, and I think a big part of this film was trying to make sure that we translated that onscreen, which I hope we did,” Freeman said. “Ultimately, Tony got to a place where he was comfortable around us and with these big changes happening, and that growth on film was remarkable to witness in real time. I mean, when we first met him, there’s no way he believed there would ever be a world [in which] he would even hear from his family, or find a way to contact them, or have that much interest in reuniting with them. [We provided him] a forum to talk about things he had never talked about — or hadn’t even thought about — in 40 years, and I think he took advantage of that, spoke about things that he would never otherwise have spoken about.
“I think that gave him a sense of confidence that he was taking his story in his own hands. And I think through that confidence, the things that used to be scary became a lot less scary. And that was a big reason why I think he was able to change in the way he did.”
‘We opened a window — or a door, maybe’
It was a perilous path, psychologically and emotionally, requiring Powell to push beyond the barriers he’d constructed and confront the horrors of what he’d done. It wasn’t easy for Petros and Freeman, either, but it makes “Last Guest” such compelling viewing.
“I think there were many, many moments throughout the process and the whole experience that we had conflicted feelings about Tony,” Freeman said. “Initially, what I think started this project was this shared sense of humor, this sort of friendship, this kinship that we developed early on. I mean, he was like, at first, just this funny grandpa who was a professional soccer player in England. He was a joy and a riot to be around. He was so much fun to just hang out with.
“But as we learned a lot more, and we learned of things he was keeping from us — or not being ready to share — as we learned some of the more difficult sides of him, there were moments that we were conflicted about him. And many moments in the film that there’s apparent frustration, not only from other people and family members and people he has relationships with, but from us, from the filmmakers. It’s hard to not get close to someone that you’re spending all this time with, whether we’re making a documentary or not. At the end of the day, Tony became a close friend who we cared about.
“When Tony was hiding from something that was painful or avoiding the truth, because he didn’t want to admit to something, [we approached it as you would with] your good friend who you don’t want to see make a bad decision. You want to encourage them to not do that. And at times we felt our relationship with Tony veer into that close-friend sort of territory, so when we were frustrated with him, it wasn’t so simple for us to feel like, ‘OK, let’s let you lie about this, and we’ll just move on.’ We felt a little bit of a responsibility to make sure the truth was conveyed.”
Freeman cites a “complicated, frustrating, wonderful friendship with Tony that has been through every dip and valley.”
“When you go through such an immensely emotional experience, when we’re right by Tony’s side through all of this,” he said, “we developed such a closeness and such a bond to him that no matter what, although he’s made these pretty horrendous mistakes, he’s someone that we want to see succeed. Ultimately, through the film, we want to leave Tony in a place that was hopefully better than when we first met him.”
As a short, “Last Guest” can close with Powell’s eviction. As a feature, so much more is required.
“When the opportunity came for it to be a feature,” Petros said in the Lumiere Cinema Q&A, “when Robbie Rogers wanted to help make it a feature, we went to Tony. and we said, ‘Hey, we know you don’t know anyone from your past life. We would want to find them as part of this documentary.’ ”
Powell was reluctant.
“We had been trying to do a lot of research, and we thought we had maybe found his family, but he wouldn’t let us contact them,” Petros said. “It wasn’t until he was [dealing with health issues] that he was, like, ‘OK, I’m ready.’ He had this deal with us where he’s, like, ‘If you reach out to them, and they tell you to fuck off, they don’t want to talk to me, never tell me. Just tell me you couldn’t find them.’ ”
The search, Freeman said, “took months.”
“[His sisters] had changed their names, because they had been married,” Petros said in the NYU Tisch conversation. “Nick and I were pursuing every avenue. I was on ancestry.com looking up stuff; we did a 23andMe DNA test, hoping there’d be family pop-ups. I was joining Facebook groups in Bristol and posting, looking for these people.”
“We truly were sleuths,” Freeman said. “I think we maybe thought it’d be easier. Tony rightfully was, like: ‘Good luck. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find anyone. They might be dead. I have no idea.’ ”
Freeman, seeking Powell’s older brother, put together a list of every Roy Powell in England. One was living in Bristol, so he and Petros called that one first.
“We said, ‘Hi, is this Roy Powell?’ ” Petros said. “And he goes, ‘Yes, who’s this?’ And we said, ‘We’re a couple of guys in America. We are friends of Tony Powell, the former soccer player. We’re looking for his brother.’ And his brother just immediately started sobbing.”
Powell and his sister Denise Smith chatted for the first time in 42 years a few days later. What follows — the reunion, the reconciliation, the restoration of what had been lost — seems a miracle. And there was more to reveal.
“I’m so grateful that he said yes,” Petros said opening night at the Lumiere Cinema. “Knowing what I know now, I’m kind of surprised that he did. I think we met him at a time in his life where he was curious and ready to explore the mistakes he had made. I think in his head it was always something he was going to go back and correct. And I think we found him at the right time that gave him that opportunity. …
“We opened a window — or a door, maybe — and Tony was the one who climbed through it. But the people that helped pull him across, really, were his sisters. And I think there’s a totally sane [potential] response where we find his sisters, and they go, ‘We don’t want to talk to him.’ … They so beautifully were able to reconnect with Tony in a way that made him feel trusted and cared for. And I think that was so big in him not shutting down or being afraid to continue to move forward.”
So much credit, all agree, goes to Petros and Freeman. They opened a path to a new, fuller life for Powell just by wandering by and “shouting up” at him, then following their instincts.
“I actually believe this,” Rogers said, “I don’t know if Tony would be alive if it weren’t for these guys.”
‘There’s no way that I could be gay and be a soccer player’
Powell left England nearly a decade before Fashanu revealed he was gay, then watched sorrowfully from West Hollywood as everything spiraled for his former teammate. Things had changed considerably by the time Rogers emerged 22½ years later. The stark differences in their coming-out tales speak to how public attitudes about homosexuality have evolved since the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a dramatic surge following incremental advances after the 1969 Stonewall Riots kicked off the gay-rights movement in earnest.
When Fashanu came out in October 1990 — in an exclusive with The Sun tabloid after claiming another national newspaper, never identified, threatened to expose him —being gay was widely perceived as a disgusting mental illness, a moral depravity, a threat to the social fabric, the root of a deadly contagion, and an affront to God. And, depending on the scenario, it was potentially illegal.
The landscape was quite different when Rogers emerged 22½ years later, in a self-penned blog post, with gay marriage increasingly legal, job discrimination against gays increasingly illegal, widespread medical and spousal rights, mainstreamed LGBTQIA+ participation in the military, universal corporate acceptance, approval within most major religions, and homosexuality generally considered a fact of life, like left-handedness or red hair.
Homosexuality has existed longer than humanity — a 2019 Yale study identified same-sex activity in the earliest organisms hundreds of millions of years before there were mammals — and it’s present in at least 1,500 current species, with accelerated concentrations among mammals and birds. Same-sex pairings were generally considered normal across diverse civilizations through most of human history; the rise of homophobia accompanied the spread of Christianity in the late fourth century, and the emergence of the Degeneration Theory nearly 1,500 years later, from a misreading of Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species, tagged same-sex attraction as a degenerative neurological disease. Gay people were largely shunned from that point.
There had been chatter that Fashanu was gay as soon as he burst into football consciousness. It was an open secret inside the game, and Brian Clough, who in August 1981 made Fashanu the first black £1 million footballer, publicly called him a “bloody poof” after learning — during the forward’s poor run of form upon arrival from Norwich City — that he frequented gay clubs. Clough, who later expressed remorse for his actions, bullied Fashanu, barred him from first-team training, loaned him out to Southampton, and soon sent him, for all of £150,000, to Notts County, a move that sparked regeneration. A 1985 knee injury derailed the Londoner’s career.
The scathing reaction to Fashanu’s 1990 disclosure, especially within the game and in England’s black media, caught him by surprise, the forward later claimed. He’d expected, he said, to be the butt of jokes, get plenty of stick from punters on the terraces — he had no problem with that — and everyone would eventually move on. He’d misread the room entirely. The Professional Footballers’ Association offered no backing whatsoever. No player publicly came to his defense. His brother, a Wimbledon FC star who had emerged from Norwich City’s academy, disowned him. He was a pariah.
Fashanu would spend the rest of his career bouncing across oceans to play for minor clubs (Toronto Blizzard and Atlanta Ruckus among them) and hanged himself in May 1998 after he was charged with sexual assault for what he called a consensual encounter.
Homophobia within the game hadn’t waned much by the time Rogers — a swift, skillful winger who had grown up in Los Angeles and Orange counties, played for top SoCal clubs, and took part in U.S. Soccer’s U-17 residency in Bradenton, Fla. — emerged as a hot prospect. He’d recognized he was “different” in childhood and gay at 14, kept that hidden, and attempted to fit in with great success but nagging doubt.
Rogers won an NCAA title as a freshman at Maryland, immediately departed for a pro contract in the Netherlands, with Heerenveen, and two years later played in the Beijing Olympics and helped Columbus to an MLS Cup title. Leeds United came calling in late 2011. Injuries quickly upended his career, and he departed the second-tier club at the start of 2013 following a loan spell with third-tier Stevenage. He then, sparked by a coach’s slur during his brief time toiling in suburban London, revealed he was gay and announced his retirement.
“I grew up in locker rooms in soccer since I was 5 years old,” Rogers told Soccer America two years ago, “and the amount of homophobia I came across just in soccer in general … I’m afraid [I held] this version in my head, this reality in my head, that there’s no way that I could be gay and be a soccer player. And if I come out, I’m going to be offside. I’ll be walking on eggshells. I’m going to walk into the shower, and my teammates are gonna walk out. There’ll be whispering around me.”
If his teammates “knew I was gay,” he told The Athletic, “my life was over.”
‘The math just doesn’t add up. There’s just no possible way that’s true’
Rogers couldn’t have been more wrong. So many reached out to him, expressing gratitude and support, among them former teammates who had contributed to the clubhouse homophobia he’d endured. Bruce Arena, coming off back-to-back MLS Cup titles with the Galaxy, let him know he was welcome to join in training any time he liked, an offer that led to a contract three months later, another MLS championship ring the following season, and — through a TV pilot based on his experience, sold to ABC but never filmed — an entryway into Hollywood.
Rogers soon met Berlanti, they fell in love, and when injury closed his career after the 2016 MLS campaign, he stepped into the “industry.” He worked as a producer and then executive producer alongside his husband on two TV series and again as a producer on the 2022 film “My Policeman,” a tale of a closeted gay cop in 1950s England. That led to his work with Oscar-nominated writer Ron Nyswaner — and a 2024 Golden Globe nomination — in developing “Fellow Travelers,” an adaptation of a bestselling novel profiling two gay men from the McCarthy-era “Lavender Scare” queer crackdown in government through the AIDS crisis.
“The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel” fell into his lap as work on that miniseries, which is available on Paramount+, neared its finish.
“One of the biggest reasons I wanted to be part of this is just to really learn about Tony and to hear his story,” Rogers said. “I don’t know if ‘educational’ is the right word, but it’s really enlightening to be around him and to see what he’s like, what he doesn’t like, ways that he doesn’t want to share. When he gets emotional talking about his partner or his family — all of that was just very revealing. Just as revealing as what he did say was what he wasn’t able to say.”
Berlanti and the loose cadre of filmmakers surrounding him are responsible for some of the most authentic, layered depictions of gay life in cinema. Berlanti’s contributions have been particularly significant: WB’s “Dawson’s Creek” offered primetime television’s first passionate kiss between men; ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters” provided an openly gay central character; and his well-received 2018 film “Love, Simon” was the first major-studio rom-com about a gay teenager.
There’s a profound importance in telling queer stories in an era of strong pushback against the gains of the past three decades, product of a far-right movement — one demonizing the community, succeeding in reeling in gay rights, targeting transgender people, and banning associated literature — that has grown in stature here during Donald Trump‘s presidency and worldwide with the rise of the New Right.
“It’s funny, because on one hand you think that in 2026, it’s never been a more welcoming time to be queer and to be your authentic self,” Freeman said. “But at the same time, there is that pushback. It’s not lost on us that in [this year’s] World Cup, there wasn’t a single openly gay player. The math just doesn’t add up. There’s just no possible way that’s true. So it’s obvious that there’s still this issue that is pervasive.”
Hollywood has played a distinct role in changing attitudes about and growing acceptance for queer culture, starting with William Friedkin’s 1970 stage adaptation “The Boys in the Band.” There has always been a strong queer connection within the entertainment industry — some of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood were publicly closeted -— and gay coding or subtext was employed to work around Hays Code censorship from 1934 into the 1960s across a diverse selection of films, from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Best Picture winner “Rebecca,” “Rope,” and “Strangers on a Train” to Film Noir classics “The Maltese Falcon,” “Laura” and “Gilda,” influential Westerns “Red River” and “Johnny Guitar,” Tennessee Williams adaptation “Cat on a Hit Tin Roof,” 1959 Best Picture-winning religious epic “Ben-Hur,” and Stanley Kubrick’s disavowed Roman spectacle “Spartacus.” European cinema, going back to the 1930s, was generally less circumspect in depicting gay themes.
Hays had faded by the late 1960s and especially with the onset of “New Hollywood” —the celebrated American auteur era kicked off by 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde” — enabling more explicit depictions of gay life in such films as “Inside Daisy Clover,” “Reflections in a Golden Eye” and 1969 Best Picture winner “Midnight Cowboy.”
The game-changer was “The Boys in the Band,” based on Mart Crowley’s landmark 1968 off-Broadway drama: No coding, no apologies, just a diverse set of gay characters existing outside the heterosexual gaze. It wasn’t without controversy — gay activists hated it, for its descent into self-pity and reliance on tragic psychological tropes — but its explicit depiction of queer existence was revolutionary in mainstream American cinema.
PBS’s groundbreaking 1973 documentary series “An American Family” took it further, empathetically capturing a flamboyant young man’s pursuit of a gay lifestyle in a broader look at a Santa Barbara family. Then arrived Christopher Larkin’s “A Very Natural Thing,” the first American feature film made by an openly gay filmmaker for a gay audience, and suddenly authentic queer characters were dotted through mainstream productions. “Making Love,” in 1982, was the first studio film explicitly focused on a gay male romance. “Desert Hearts” did likewise with lesbians three years later, and 1985 TV movie “An Early Frost” humanized the ongoing AIDS pandemic.
More signposts followed with the independent, radical “New Queer Cinema” — highlights include Gus Van Sant’s 1991 Shakespeare reconstruction “My Own Private Idaho” and Gregg Araki’s anarchic road movie “The Living End” — and through mainstream triumph “Philadelphia,” Jonathan Demme’s Nyswaner-penned, 1993 Oscar-winning AIDS drama, with 1990s TV series “Will & Grace,” “Ellen,” “Roseanne” and “My So-Called Life,” and then Ang Lee’s 2005 Best Picture nominee “Brokeback Mountain.” Gay subject matter is commonplace in 21st century cinema and television.
‘The thing that is universal is the shame and the secrecy’
“The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel” serves a significant function within all of this, as a portrait of a tough-guy athlete unable to live his reality and how that diminished his life and that of those who loved him.
Rogers doesn’t think of the film “as a sports story or an LGBT story.”
“It’s a story,” he said, “about what happens when you keep secrets and when there’s so much fear that stops you from sharing very intimate details with the people you love.” It’s a lesson, Petros says, “on the consequence that happens when society doesn’t allow people to be their true selves.”
Things have evolved, but the struggle goes on.
“As a gay person who grew up in the early aughts, and now getting to help Tony tell his story … you can see the change,” Petros said during the NYU Tisch conversation. “When he was growing up, it was almost impossible to come out. It would have affected every aspect of his life. He couldn’t have had the career he wanted; it would have destroyed his life immediately. Obviously, I grew up in a place where that’s not true for me, but the thing that is universal is the shame and the secrecy. That’s still part of us.
“I think, for me, this film is an example of the consequences of not being able to be who you are. It didn’t just affect Tony, it affected every single person in his life who knew him and who he connected with. Because of this secret he had, that he never felt like he could come out, he just ran away and started over a new life. Keeping his identity a secret, hiding his true self until he was alone, didn’t give the people who loved him the opportunity to get to know him as he was. The lesson Tony learns at 75 is to give the people who love you the opportunity to love you as you are.”
The filmmakers hope “Last Guest” can have “as much impact as possible.”
“It is a drop in the bucket, in the greater scheme of this problem,” Freeman said. “But it’s important. And I think representation really does matter. And it matters for those kids who are growing up, who are closeted or might not have come out or are still coming to terms with who they are but want to pursue a career in professional sports. It may encourage that person to not be afraid and to do it anyways. …
“Robbie Rogers said something early on that really stuck with me. He said that when he was growing up and he was pursuing a career in professional soccer, if this film had been available to him, if he’d have been able to watch this film, that would have completely changed the way he approached it. And he may have come out earlier, he may have had the courage to come out earlier, knowing Tony’s story. So if our film can change even one young athlete’s heart and help give them the courage to be their authentic selves, then I think that’s a complete win. I call that a complete success.”
The response to the film has been tremendous. It sold out its debut screening last summer at Tribeca -— was among Vogue’s five must-sees at that festival — claimed a Special Jury Prize at Australia’s Antenna Documentary Film Festival in February, and followed as significant critical and audience hits at the BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival in March and San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival in June.
It’s the year’s highest-grossing film at the Lumiere Cinema running, to all involved’s surprise, for nine weeks; opened as AppleTV’s No. 1 documentary in July, and remains among the most-watched there and on Prime Video and Fandango. The Hollywood Reporter cited this week mentioned it as a potential Oscar nominee.
“Last Guest” has few peers among films about or involving soccer, standing beside Asif Kapadia’s compelling 2019 documentary profile “Maradona,” Tom Hooper’s 2009 Brian Clough character study “The Damned United,” Ken Loach’s 2009 Cantona deconstruction “Looking for Eric,” Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2018 deadpan what-if ”Infinite Football,” Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 on-field analysis “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait,” Jeff and Michael Zimbalist‘s 2010 documentary tragedy “The Two Escobars,” Abbas Kiarostami‘s 1974 yearning “The Traveler,” Jafar Panahi’s 2006 political indictment “Offside,” and Alexandre Koberidze’s poetic 2021 meditation “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky”?
(Photo: Cassandra Giraldo)
Now Petros and Freeman possess real cachet as they embark on directing careers. Corkin says that they are “so far ahead of themselves as filmmakers … beyond their years,” and he’s thankful to have played a role in their emergence.
“I am so proud of this particular film, and I think it’s because of how layered it is, honestly. … Just the craft of it itself. Every time I’ve watched it — and I’ve watched it dozens of times, dozens of cuts — and it brings me such joy that it’s an enjoyable film that champions the human spirit. I can watch it over and over again. There’s films that I’ve made that I certainly wouldn’t say that about.”
When Powell first saw it, Freeman said, “the first thing he said to us was, ‘Well, it was way more professional than I thought it would be.’ And he was completely shocked by that.”
Making the film afforded Petros and Freeman great insight into their craft.
“It’s been a whole new version of film school, in terms of how do you get something funded, how do you get something released so that people are aware about it,” Petros said. “It has been a great asset to just learn the business and how to make a movie on such a large scale.
“My three shorts, we’re shooting for three days, four days. By the end of it, I’ve directed a total of 10 days on set. On this project, we shot for 130 days. Just in terms of the number of hours that we now have as directors, that’s been so valuable. Our instincts and our process have improved so much, and when I watch the film, as it goes on, I can see it get better technically. The sound quality gets better, the images get better. It’s just a lot of learning how to work with your resources along the way.”
That’s valuable, will serve them well — us, too, as filmgoers — but the impact upon them has been far more profound.
“I think the biggest things I took away from this haven’t anything to do with filmmaking,” Freeman said. “It’s something that I think I would have robbed myself of if I was more stubborn and didn’t want to do a documentary because I would be hell-bent on doing narratives. Making documentary films, for one, it exposes you to the real world. And there’s no greater lessons than can be derived from seeing real people make real decisions, real mistakes, and learn.
“To be front seat in watching this incredible journey of a man who disappeared and was hiding from the world and ultimately able to make amends and reconnect — I mean, we’re talking about a man who was hiding for 40 years, longer than I’ve been alive. The gravity of this is something that I’ll never forget. And to be able to see the capacity for forgiveness in his family and people around him, that truly changed the way I feel about relationships, about family, about people in my own life who I maybe lost contact with. Seeing the way that Tony’s family navigated this was incredibly inspiring, humbling, and I think just gave me so much faith in our ability to forgive and in the importance of family. Just seeing the way his family was, it will stick with me forever.”
Making the film “really changed our lives,” he said. “And I know deep down that I’ll never be a part of another project that is this unique and incredible.”