Ben Whishaw on the ability of Peter Hujar’s pictures: ‘It feels alive’

Ben Whishaw is a notoriously non-public individual. Nevertheless, I’ve began our interview by asking the 45-year-old British actor how he acquired off the bed the day prior to this. “Yesterday, I woke up at around 7:30, but I knew I wanted more sleep,” says Whishaw. “I had a sense of excitement, because I’d had a really busy few days leading up to that morning, and I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t have to be anywhere.’ I turned over and lay in the dark for another half an hour. I got up and made myself a coffee. I didn’t have any breakfast. Maybe a handful of nuts.”

It’s a Thursday afternoon, on December 4, 2025, after I meet Whishaw and the 60-year-old American director Ira Sachs on the Londoner Hotel. Their newest collaboration after 2023’s Passages is Peter Hujar’s Day, a genre-defying movie that’s neither documentary nor fiction. On December 19, 1974, the celebrated queer photographer Peter Hujar described his earlier day in nice element to Linda Rosenkrantz, a author who recorded and transcribed their dialog. With Whishaw and Rebecca Hall because the leads, Sachs’ movie recreates that day’s occasions – not the day described, however the describing itself.

The result’s hypnotic and deceptively easy: for 70 minutes, it’s a dialogue that focuses on the photographer’s earlier day and nothing else. The motion, in case you can name it that, by no means leaves Rosenkrantz’s New York flat, aside from smoke breaks on the balcony. It’s stuffed with tantalising contradictions: a wordy, stagey piece that’s cinematic via grainy cinematography and avant-garde cutaways; an immersive, grounded drama that’s so Brechtian it ends on an applause break.

“It’s important to state emphatically that I had no mission to introduce people to Peter Hujar,” says Sachs. “It’s really about two actors on a set who are transmitting this conversation between Peter and Linda.” But it’s a contented accident if viewers uncover Hujar’s work? “I like that you’re pushing back, even though I say that wasn’t my intention. On no level would I not want people to discover his work, because his work is a gift, particularly to queer people.”

In 1974, Hujar is 40 years outdated and ascending in his profession. His earlier day entails speaking to Susan Sontag on the telephone, and photographing Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times; he name-drops acquaintances like Fran Lebowitz, William S. Burroughs and Ed Baynard. He frets his day is “boring”, but his account, together with the ordering of Chinese meals, is engrossing. It’s in the end Hujar’s inquisitive power, not his pictures, that’s on show.

Sachs and Whishaw are avowed followers, the latter proudly owning a 1980 self-portrait referred to as “Seated Self-Portrait Depressed” in his residence. “His art will always be as if it was made today,” says Whishaw. “It feels alive. He managed to catch an intimacy with people – actually, not just people, but frequently animals as well – where he could get them to be so open to him. When I try to take photos, that exchange is difficult, because lots of people understandably don’t want to be photographed. It’s quite an aggressive act, photographing someone. You’re sort of taking something from them. To encourage someone to feel relaxed, open, and able to be intimate – that was his great genius. And it’s what he saw in people as well.”

 It’s fairly an aggressive act, photographing somebody. You’re kind of taking one thing from them. To encourage somebody to really feel relaxed, open, and capable of be intimate – that was Hujar’s nice genius

Sachs found the transcript in a homosexual e-book store in France in the course of the capturing of Passages. By then, the ums and ahs had already been eliminated. “The transcript is quite musical, exact and verbatim,” says Sachs. “I’m certain when Linda typed it up 51 years ago, she removed several ums. But she did not remove the natural inflexion of how people talk in conversation.”

“I had an impulse to make it more, ‘Oh, let me just find this word or phrase,’” says Whishaw. “But Ira kept saying, ‘Just keep talking.’ It had to have a certain amount of tension in it. It couldn’t just become soggy, meandering language.”

Hujar died in 1987, aged 53, from Aids. Throughout the movie, Hujar agonises about his well being and mortality; Rosenkrantz pleads for him to eat extra greens. When Hujar describes closing his eyes and going to sleep, there’s a poetic finality to the assertion.

“It’s a kind of literary device,” says Sachs. “We know more than the character, and that his life will end in 13 years.” But he’s agreed to be documented, and is preserving his legacy? “Yeah, but he’s really un-self-conscious, which I admire. His lack of defensiveness and trust in Linda is quite deep. It’s something I could never experience with my own therapist – he seems to totally trust that she’s going to be interested in anything he says.”

Have both of them finished an interview they’d be comfortable for actors to re-enact? “No,” says Whishaw. “I’m not interested in my interviews. I really just like doing my acting.” Because he’s the politest actor you possibly can think about, Whishaw apologises out of paranoia he’s brought about offence. “I’m interested in this interview, but I’m not interested in reading it back and thinking about what it means to other people.”

“Ben, Rebecca, and I did a panel at the end of Sundance Film Festival this year, after having done three days of what I thought were some of the most boring interviews I’ve ever done,” says Sachs. “I really had to rethink what was interesting about this film, because nothing I had said was interesting to me. But on this panel, I could pull away, and see the people I was talking to as people I had known for years, and learn something about them I had not known, which made me feel closer to them.”

I theorise that interviews for this movie have to be completely different from selling Passages, an emotionally uncooked drama about fraught relationships. When I talked to Sachs in 2023, he one way or the other acquired me to disclose deeply private details about myself that by no means made it into the article; I do know of different journalists who additionally spilled their hearts to the director when discussing Passages.

“I would guess that’s it,” Sachs says. “We can talk about what it is to be artists, and this film would generate interesting dialogue in that realm, because it speaks about the vulnerability and insecurities that we might collectively face. But it’s a film about art-making, not about love – except perhaps the love between Peter and Linda.”

I believe the function of the feminine pal who denies their very own self in dialog with me is one which I’m conversant in. There’s a task of care. The care turns into really their worth

When I reward the intimate physique language between the 2 actors, Sachs remembers studying in the course of the shoot that Hall has a number of shut, homosexual male pals. “I realised that my relationship to her, and Ben’s relationship to her, is not singular.”

Do girls make higher interviewers?

“I don’t think it’s a gendered thing,” says Whishaw.

“I think the role of the female friend who denies their own self in conversation with me is one that I’m familiar with,” says Sachs. “There’s a role of care. The care becomes actually their value.”

There’s solely time for yet one more query, which, after all, is that if both are prepared to explain how they fell asleep the earlier night time. Again, it’s Whishaw who volunteers.

“I went to bed at about 1:25am,” says Whishaw. “I was at my partner’s house, and we had had an argument.” He laughs. “We watched some telly, and sort of semi-made up, but not quite. We were lying there in the dark. The argument was kind of lingering on, but maybe it was a little bit resolved. And then we fell asleep.”

Peter Hujar’s Day is out in UK cinemas on January 2, 2026