Comedy helped Caleb Hearon process his own father’s unexpected death.
So when the comic and actor co-wrote Trash Mountain with Ruby Caster, Hearon had to consider how much to lean into comedy as tears roll down his cheeks while starring alongside Zooey Deschenal in Kris Rey’s dramedy about love and grief.
“No. If anything, I’m eager to prove that I’m not just a clown,” Hearon, the star of The Devil Wears Prada sequel and an HBO Max comedy special, told a Toronto Film Festival audience on Friday night after the world premiere of his comedic weepie.
Caster told the Scotiabank audience she was wary with Hearon as a skilled comedian in writing the wrong joke that crossed a line between drawing laughter and tears around grief. That led Hearon to break the tension by joking: “You stepped across a lot of lines. And I want to talk about that, here, tonight.”
In Trash Mountain, Hearon plays Gavin, a young gay Chicago man forced back home to rural Missouri after his hoarder father died. Once there, Gavin, who appears to have walked away from everyone he has ever loved in life, has an emotional reunion with his half-sister Abbi, played by Deschanel.
“This was a really complicated guy, and he didn’t have a perfect son either,” Hearon said of his real-life father whose inspired character doesn’t appear onscreen in Trash Mountain. But the late father is ever-present as Gavin and Abbi pick through the detritus of his life and which grows in the front yard of his home as a mountain of rubbish to be hauled away.
And as the siblings pick through mess their hoarder father left behind, one man’s trash becomes keepsakes that Gavin and Abbi must consider holding onto or leaving behind as junk. Deschanel decided after an early wardrobe call to bring one of the scarves her late grandfather wore before his death on set as a prop.
“I have them in my closet, and every time I see them I think of my grandfather. These objects can be conduits for people that have passed,” Deschanel, best known for roles in All The Real Girls and The Good Girl, told the TIFF audience.
Trash Mountain also stars Jackie Weaver, Jaboukie Young-White, Kyle Martin and Holmes, and Lilly Wachowski is among the executive producers. The Toronto Film Festival continues through to Sept. 20.