A “Talk to Me” star, an MM romance, and a shape-shifting killer entity. Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, and director Adrian Chiarella talk the standout of Sundance and SXSW.

‘Heated Rivalry of horror’? Leviticus stars say their buzzed-about film is ‘completely its own thing’ (exclusive)

A "Talk to Me" star, an MM romance, and a shape-shifting killer entity. Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, and director Adrian Chiarella talk the standout of Sundance and SXSW.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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April 3, 2026 10:00 a.m. ET

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Stacy Clausen as Ryan, Joe Bird as Naim in 'Leviticus'. Credit:

- *Leviticus* stars Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen respond to the film's "*Heated Rivalry* of Horror" nickname: "It isn't bad at all."

- The stars, plus writer/director Adriana Chiarella, unpack the inspirations fueling this unique horror story.

- "I'd wanted to merge my love of horror with homophobia," Chiarella says.

The young actors of *Leviticus* understand the temptation to call their film "the *Heated Rivalry* of horror," a nickname it earned from critics out of the Sundance Film Festival back in January.

The standout from Aussie director Adrian Chiarella centers on a love story between two teenage boys, with a dash of "spice" and heaping spoonfuls of yearning. While there's no rivalry per se, there is a shape-shifting entity that will attack a victim in the guise of their lover. So, technically, one could argue there is an air of lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers.

*"Heated Rivalry* meets *It Follows*" became another descriptor in the press.

"It's two great titles that it's being compared to, so it isn't bad at all," Joe Bird, known for his role in viral horror hit *Talk to Me*, tells ** with his costar, Stacy Clausen. "I think they still work on different levels and achieve different kinds of emotions out of the audience. With *Heated Rivalry*, such a big, queer media to blow up in the past year, it's just great to see that gay media does get watched by people."

"Obviously, there's a lot of hype around *Heated Rivalry* at the moment. So it's kind of expected that the comparisons will come," Clausen acknowledges. "But, yeah, I fully agree that it is completely its own thing."

*Leviticus*, which has since gone on to play at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, continues to drum up positive word of mouth ahead of a theatrical premiere this June 19. The inventive approach from a first-time feature-film director so directly speaks to queer audiences underneath the crowd-pleasing premise.

The opening sequence in 'Leviticus'.

Bird stars as Naim, a teen who moves with his mother (Mia Wasikowska) to a rural, religious community in regional Victoria, Australia. (The specific setting itself is superfluous; Chiarella designed a nondescript locale and time period to evoke a universal scenario.) He falls for a boy in his class, the blond-haired Ryan (Clausen), and very soon (i.e., in the opening sequence) that attraction turns physical.

Once they're outed, the church brings in a local pastor to perform an extreme ritual on the boys to "cure" them, but it only makes them a target of a violent, supernatural being that hunts and terrorizes by taking the form of the person its victim desires most. In the case of Naim and Ryan, that would be each other.

Until quite late in the process, *Leviticus* featured a scene that explained the title, which is a clear nod to the often-weaponized Biblical verse addressing homosexuality. The irony, Chiarella notes, was, "It felt literally preachy, like it was just explaining exactly what the movie was about."

'Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody' coming to off-Broadway this spring

'Talk to Me' director once drove a car filled with water as a prank

The writer-director, based in Melbourne, didn't grow up in a religious household but remembers the religiosity of the school he attended in his youth. Administrators, he recalls, would recite passages from the Bible in front of the student body that suggested queer people were abominations.

"It's so bizarre that that was all happening in our lifetime," he remarks. "It felt like something of another era. I'd wanted to merge my love of horror with homophobia because, if you think about it, horror movies are always about fear, and homophobia is a type of fear."

Initially, he thought to make "*The Exorcist*, only it's gay," but decided the messaging of that concept was counterintuitive to the intent. A bigger touchstone for *Leviticus*, especially the monster, became *Solaris*, the 1972 sci-fi film from Andrei Tarkovsky, and its idea of memories haunting you.

Joe Bird as Naim in 'Leviticus'.

"When I was digging into how this monster operates, it's not just that it looks like the person that you desire the most. It actually feeds off the memories of your interactions with that person and with your own experiences of desire," Chiarella explains. "Therefore, the more that you explore your sexuality, the more that you explore intimacy with this real person, the better the monster gets at mimicking all of that. I realized it can actually dig quite deep into what the relationship between these two boys means and into the idea of internalized homophobia. What does it mean when you get so scared of your feelings and acting on your feelings?"

Some critics refer to *Leviticus* as a "conversion-therapy horror." Chiarella was indeed inspired, in part, by stories he heard from around the world of rituals performed on queer people to rid them of perversion. Though he also channeled the very real homophobic micro-aggressions — and more blatant aggressions — he experienced in life as a gay man.

Yet, the core narrative of *Leviticus* is a genuine love story, one that hinges on the performances of Bird and Clausen.

The team held workshops with multiple short-listed actors. The pair, Chiarella points out, had immediate chemistry. The director knew of Bird through *Talk to Me*, co-produced by the same company attached to *Leviticus*, Causeway Films. Chiarella initially wrote the actor off as too young for the role of Naim — plus Bird submitted his outdated 14-year-old headshot for the audition.

*Talk to Me* ended up playing a larger, albeit subconscious part in the creation of *Leviticus*. Clausen saw that cursed-hand possession film from Michael and Danny Philippou and became keen to meet with the heads of Causeway to get involved with their next project, which turned out to be *Bring Her Back*, another disturbing tale from the Philippou brothers. Clausen didn't land a role in that film, but by the time *Leviticus* came around, they all knew his name.

"Ryan was tough to crack," he says of the role, while praising their acting coach, New Zealand-based Miranda Harcourt. "He is super masculine and puts on this massive front. There's so much that he doesn't reveal to the audience and to the characters in the story, as well. That was one of the biggest things, this mask that he puts on for people."

What Chiarella remembers most was a flub during the actors' chemistry test that proved endearing. "I hit [Clausen] in the face with this little pole by mistake," Bird recalls. "We were recreating a scene at the start of the film, and we're poking something. I grabbed it off, and it flicked into his face."

"They laughed, and there was this moment where I realized I can get these guys to improvise and break away from the scene and just be themselves around each other," Chiarella says.

Stacy Clausen (Ryan) and Joe Bird (Naim) in 'Leviticus'.

Naim marks Bird's first time in a leading film role, and the character is far more reserved than Ryan. He's someone who's already isolated, both from his community and his true inner self. Though Chiarella experimented briefly in an early script draft with shifting POVs, the entirety of *Leviticus* is told from Naim's perspective, which means Clausen has the added responsibility of portraying the entity on screen.

The most important piece of direction in that regard: "Make the entity feel like a void," Clausen shares. "When we were figuring out how it moves, there was a conversation about a predator. It kind of moves like a jaguar. It stalks. It doesn't run. It never runs. It always is just there. It sneaks up, it gets close."

In one particular sequence, the supernatural killer, in the form of Ryan, pushes his arm deeper and deeper down Naim's throat.

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"There were three different arms that were made. They'd switch them in and out," Bird explains of that sequence. "The longest one, because the whole end of it was so big, I had to fold it up like a hamburger and then try to put it in my mouth. At one point, I had that in my mouth and Stacy's fingers in my mouth…"

"What I remember from that is Joe almost throwing up on my arm," Clausen adds.

"Nothing came out," Bird responds. "That's all that matters."

That scene, as well as others, serves as a reminder of what kind of film *Leviticus* is. What begins as a "slow-burn love story with just a sprinkling of horror," Chiarella describes, quickly accelerates. "I really felt we needed to see it erupt and explode and to remind the audience, 'Don't forget, this is a horror movie.'"

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Source: “EW Horror”