How Lurker Director Alex Russell Went From Writing for The Bear and Beef to Making One of the Summer’s Best Movies

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV.

It may seem like we’re being inundated with cautionary tales about the corrosive allure of celebrity lately, but the just-released Lurker, in theaters now, is a rare worthwhile new entry to the subgenre. Written and directed by first-time filmmaker Alex Russell, Lurker immediately feels like a distinct and specific snapshot of a specific slice of the music industry. The film tracks one fan’s calculated moves to ingratiate himself into the entourage of a decidedly genre-amorphous pretty-boy singer-songwriter—and the increasingly cringe (and eventually, increasingly dangerous) things he’ll do to maintain that proximity and leverage for even more. Buoyed by engrossing performances from Théodore Pellerin as the titular lurker and Saltburn’s Archie Madekwe as the object of his obsession, it’s taut, darkly funny, and bound to feel at least vaguely familiar to anyone who’s worked in or around the music industry in the last 10 years.

That’s because in this case, Russell really lived his raps: before working his way up in television as a staff writer on Dave, Beef and The Bear—he wrote “Forks,” arguably the series’ high point—Russell spent time in New York music media during the mid 2010s as a writer for publications like Complex and Vice. He also spent time with actual rap entourages like the Atlanta-based Awful Records crew—which is how he became cool with Zack Fox, who has a supporting part in Lurker.

Russell and I go back something like 10 years, having been around each other during our respective stints at Complex; after I screened Lurker I caught up with him over Zoom to talk about his journey from freelance writer to feature filmmaker.

GQ: This is our informal catch-up. We haven't had a chance to link. You’re busy making movies.

Alex Russell: We're grown-ups now.

This film is about people's parasocial fascinations with celebrities, an idea that feels extremely of the moment. How did you land on it as a concept?

I feel like a lot of journalists really understand this movie, because everyone is playing a game of access and boundaries. Everyone: you, even political reporters and stuff, they have to keep it cool with evil leaders so that they can get the interview. I think that everyone is constantly on this boundary of, What is the line where I should be ashamed, or where I’m putting myself out there in the situation too much? Where am I allowed to be, and how can I distinguish myself between the thing that I'm doing, my job, and the environment that I'm in?

The parasocial thing is obviously very talked-about now, but I wanted to make a movie that really didn't have to take place now, in that a lot of what's happening, it's not necessarily happening on the phone. I think what's very modern is that you could see your favorite artist hanging out in a video, and then if you happened to be around them, you’d know what type of talk to engage in, or how you maybe want to move or what you wouldn't want to say or what you would want to say. And I think the ways that people prepare for interactions are really funny.

One thing I was thinking about the other day was the idea of “Nice to meet you.” It feels almost archaic because so often when you meet someone now, if they're a friend of a friend, you've probably seen 10 photos of them at least before meeting them.

And you can already almost game out what the interaction is going to be like.

Yeah, and there's a normal version of that that isn't that crazy, and then you could take it to any level of extreme. I mean, even in this movie—it's not as extreme as certain things I've seen happen in real life. What I want people to understand about this movie is there's nothing that happens in it that's outside the realm of possibility or probability. Worse things have happened.

I’m glad you put it that way, because as I was watching this, thinking about the time you spent with the Awful Records crew, after a while I was like, Is this a Twilight Zone extreme version of what it was like to be in that bubble?

I mean, looking back, the Awful era was actually much less like this movie than what the LA scene is. A lot of those Atlanta Awful kids, they were not really paying that much attention to who was in power and who was trying to do what. But I did see certain people come in and out and you watch as the dynamics change, or if one artist is getting big and one artist is falling off or something like that, you can see, Oh, now this person has a music video director around who's doing it for free. But I feel like looking back, that time in my life was very wholesome in a way. And I'm still friends with some of them—I’m obviously still really close with Zack.

But I think what I really was feeling at that time was this idea that anyone could be anything—especially in our early to mid-twenties, we're still figuring out what we want to do with our creative urges and what it looks like for us to grow up and how we can apply any writing skill that we have. Where is that going to go? Are we better at one version of it than another? And I feel like life and careers have a way of forcing you into a lane eventually, and it's a good thing, because you also see people who try to do everything and it doesn't work or you're spreading yourself too thin.

Well, it's funny because there's some dark shit in this movie and it goes to some dark places, but if you do step back from it, there is a positive theme, about the boundlessness of creativity, and all the different industries that surround our industry in this Venn-diagram way where you can be anything if you have the drive to be anything.

Yeah, I think there is a fundamental relatability to that, and there's an innocence to this kid who's just trying to put himself out there. There was a point where you and I both had to go into a room where some group of people who had the power had the opportunity that we wanted. They had to like us by the end of that interaction, or they had to think that, "Oh, this is a kid we're giving some work to.” So anyone I think can feel that, especially people who went into a field where it wasn't an obvious life track or a school track.

A field without this obvious ladder and trajectory to climb.

Working in media in New York, I'm sure a lot of the steps that you took along the way weren't obvious. There are moves especially to survive that industry, which is so unstable and unhinged and constantly adapting, especially at the time that we got into it.

I was going to say, with all the handwringing now, even 10 years ago it was nuts. “Pivot to video…”

I mean it was already a bit that people were doing at that time and I'm sure we were like, "Damn, I just got here."

It's like Tony Soprano: “I came in at the end of something.”

Totally. I think about that a lot. There was a Golden Age, and you just missed it. Just missed it. And in Hollywood, it just feels like a bigger ship that's also sinking. But that's also what's so fun about it—you have to figure it out. There was no time where you didn't have to figure it out, but especially now, you have to adapt to whatever's going on and find your way. These fields were never promised to anyone. It's literally a dream job.

The debut feature is like your debut album, right? It's the thing you've been thinking about your whole life, it's your first impression. So how did you really land on this idea being the one you wanted to really make your first step out there with?

I think now, the challenge is to find focus because there are a lot of shiny things that I could do or could spend a lot of time investing creatively in, but back then it was like I would either be unemployed or have one opportunity and I feel like it's going to be harder to do a second movie because it could make it about anything. Whereas doing the first movie, it was really like, "What do I understand? What am I feeling right now?"

It was such an exploration of early twenties life of boys and the music world, and obviously I wanted to make that feel like a real movie and feel universal, but I had just the right amount of tether to the material. Maybe I haven't lived through that scene, but I've been in that room. It was also a part of my education in screenwriting, trying to figure out how to write something longer. It was 2020 and I had just gotten into the profession, so I was like, "Can I even write something longer?"

And the stakes were super low. The stakes were, can I physically get to page 100 so that I can say I wrote a feature? I think it started out really like, Well, this would be funny, or This is something I've seen that is a character that I think is really rich in potential. So what probably started out was one scene that's in the movie now or some evolution of it was just me writing it almost a sketch.

Do you remember which scene that was?

I think the opening scene I wrote pretty early on. In the store where I was like, "This is how a kid might calculate this interaction." I just found that really funny and I was like, "What if he takes it all the way?" And in a way it's almost like Curb logic, where the story is about a guy who won't let something go or will continue to double down in a way that you think is going to embarrass them. Then you're down the spiral of humiliation, then you can't really go back.

There are some big cringe moments.

I was trying to elevate the cringe to the highest level. That was my north star: what is going to be just so uncomfortable to watch from his perspective? I always talk about King of Comedy, because to me, watching that movie, you're not really in his shoes. You're watching him from afar almost objectively. But in my movie, it's like you're feeling his moment-to-moment embarrassment and hopes and dreams in every minute. Is he going to say the right thing? Is he going to be cool? Is he going to fuck it up? I think people can relate to that on a basic level. Then there gets to a point where you're like, "Yeah, I wouldn't personally do that, but I get why he is doing that." I think that there's never a point where people are like, "I don't understand why he's doing this anymore."

So let's walk it back. You and I met in the larger New York media sphere, when we were both at Complex. Then you go off, you spend some time with Father and the Awful Records dudes. Talk me through the rest of your journey, from Dave and Beef and The Bear to here.

I mean, between 2015 and 2019 was when it occurred to me that this is what I wanted to do. I felt like there wasn't really a job for me otherwise. I would fantasize about finding what my passion was going to be that I hadn't found yet, like maybe I'd get into architecture or something.

I was hoping something like that would happen. But I ended up just doing very low-stakes writing half-hour pilots, and it wasn't obvious if that was going to turn into anything because I didn't know anyone who had done it—even our New York media world, that was pretty separate from Hollywood, at that time especially. Maybe now there's a little more mingling, but back then it just seemed so far-fetched as a segue. But then at the same time all of these magazines were pivoting and maybe they'd have video content or they'd have a YouTube channel, like Vice would make shorts and stuff like that. But I remember the first spec that I ever wrote was an Atlanta spec, before the show was out.

I remember they announced the show and at the time I was in Atlanta and all my friends were in music. I was like, “Oh, maybe I could do that.”

So it's probably one of the worst things I've ever [written], but it felt really cool to just be in Final Draft and be like, “This is a scene. Maybe this is a character.” I think what's really great about what we came up doing, is the iteration process of writing something and getting a response.

I think a lot of aspiring writers, they'll try to write something like their epic feature or novel or something like that and they wonder why it never gets done. You have to do smaller things and complete things and complete stories, and then you can reach out to something that's more complex or longer. But I think the process of actually getting stuff done, getting feedback, getting edited, stuff like that is just making a movie just in a larger process.

So I was writing specs. No one cared except me, and me and Zack were trying to figure out what we were going to do, and I think it was more obvious that he was going to be this personality, and that he was so effortlessly funny and he could act. That just was so not me. And especially when you're with someone obviously cooler than you, you're just like, "All right, well, I'm going to pick a different lane." I focused on writing a bunch of half-hour specs that take place in the music world, but it wasn't obvious that that was the path.

Write what you know.

It was also what I wanted to see, I guess. I was obsessed with music and I was constantly seeking out new music in a way that I totally don't do anymore. Me and Zach helped make some music videos. It was also very amateurish. And then in 2017, I'm already failing at this for multiple years and Zack and I get this opportunity to make a pilot for the Viceland Network, and I want to say the budget for that was 30k. For reference, a half-hour FX pilot cost millions of dollars, but we didn't know that. We were like, "Yeah, let's just shoot this like how we shoot some bullshit." It started out as a sketch show, but then turned into this buddy comedy thing.

The story was he and I were at Magic City and my character has this sort of Nathan Fielder idea to future-proof the strip club. The idea was that it'd reinvent the stripper pole and it was going to turn into this zero gravity stripper tube where you remove the pole and you put the strippers in the tube and they're naked and you throw money. We made it, it actually came out. I'm really proud of it. I think it's super funny for what it is.

And of course they didn't make the fucking show, and the entire company fell [apart]. I think we got a call that was like, "Hey, the good news is we like the pilot and the bad news is this entire arm of the media company is gone, so good luck."

But I had the taste of it and it was so intoxicating that I had to just keep writing. I kept writing stuff in that world, and that was ultimately how I got on Dave. And I wasn't super familiar with who he was before getting that job, but I was like, "Well, I am so happy to be employed." And having done as many rooms as I have now, it was the perfect first thing for me because we had Jeff Schaffer, who showruns Curb [Your Enthusiasm]. He was our showrunner too, and it was such an education on how to break a story in ways that I might not have learned on other shows. But because we had this traditional hand, I really soaked that up. If you had read anything that I'd written before that, it would've been super amorphous—like there's a voice here, but I don't know where it's going.

So being in rooms and seeing someone not be super precious was really, really educational. Screenwriting's not rocket science. The craft of this can be learned by almost anyone, but what are you going to do with the tools once you have them? So then I wrote this movie shortly after. It was mostly because COVID hit and I couldn't do anything else. Also, you get into a TV writers' room and you realize how collaborative it is and how much your voice matters, but also doesn't. How good you are in that role is about how well you can serve someone else's voice. So I didn't want to lose myself in that. And that's what this movie proved to me, that I do have my own style.

This idea of the cult of celebrity is a very popular subgenre right now, but there's been a flattening of it in some spaces. This movie immediately felt distinct and incisive—even if I didn't know you, I would feel like it's coming from someone who really knew and lived and breathed this world.

Dude, I felt crazy, because I wrote this in 2020 and then, think about it—all the shit you're talking about came out in the past five years and it took me longer because I was a nobody.

When I have ideas and then see something that comes out that’s close to it, you get that wave of panic like, "Oh, fuck, I'm cooked. It's over."

I said that every single day until I saw a cut. But you have to have faith that no one is going to do the thing the way that you are going to. And like you said, I'm playing within a subgenre that exists and has existed, and maybe even has become somewhat trendy in the past few years. I guess you can feel that it's not just someone being like, "Yo, that's crazy over there," you know what I mean?

A lot of these movies really depend on the way you depict stardom. I think the way that you wrote Archie's character is just really specific in a really smart way, and even down to the fact that he feels genre-less in an intentionally vague way.

Totally. I think writing that character and going through different stages of it, it was really important to me to beat the allegations of comparing him to any artist. I wanted to be bigger than that and more believable. Making him British was really key. That wasn't obvious and it wasn't written that way, but then once Archie got involved, it was like, "Oh, maybe this is a different kind of this character. This is a different way in."

And the fact that he's British and in LA, it all makes sense in this LA is full of everyone from everywhere kind of thing. Even the ensemble itself feels like, Oh yeah, this makes sense in LA. People often try to do this college-brochure casting, but it actually makes sense in this movie that this group would be the makeup that it is.

I was thinking about Almost Famous a lot, and you could tell in that movie that some of those things that the band is struggling with or vulnerable about, that shit is real. Even if it's taken to a more studio-movie vibe, you can tell that kid has overheard some shit, and is bringing you into that world.

This was a movie that had the potential to be the corniest movie of all time, that was fighting that the whole time. And it's every decision that comes your way as a director is like, "Do you want to make this corny movie like this? Are you going to make this choice?"

And the look of the character can change and now your movie sucks. I don't know if I can do that again. There's other stories and other worlds I'd like to get into where it's not going to be about how real it feels at the concert. But a great example of what you're talking about is all the concerts in the movie—we did them for real. Zack would just throw a party in LA and then when we would have peak capacity, Zack would be like, "All right, my friend's shooting his first movie. So we all go crazy right now. This tall, handsome British guy's about to come out and lip sync." So Archie came on stage, and he would lip sync one of these songs. No one knows who the fuck this is or what's happening, but they're all drunk. He would do a song and then run backstage, do an outfit change, do another song, run backstage. All the concerts happened in 10 minutes.

Choosing to direct is its own Sisyphean nightmare. But I would imagine it's one of those cases where it, a) wouldn't have been as organic as if you didn't direct it, and b) it might not have actually happened, or at least it wouldn’t have happened this soon, if you didn't direct it, which you hear a lot with debut films.

Yeah, you're totally right. No one wanted to fucking do this, dude. It was never the intention for me to direct it. And back in 2021 when this first was going to go and fell apart, the producers I had were just like, "You should do it." And I was like, "What? I don't know how to do that." They said, "You'll be fine,” and I’m just like.. "What?" And then the more I thought about that—at first I was thinking, Let's get this shit to Hiro [Murai]. So it wasn't a choice. There was no one else who was about to do it. And I'm really glad because in a way it was the perfect thing for me to direct. It was small.

And by the time I was actually shooting it, I had spent some time learning what I would be up against and talking to a lot of people and spending a little bit of time on set. And I can decide between two things, one of which feels more authentic than the other.

So if you're showing me production design, at least I know when something reeks or feels wrong. So then you can bounce in the other direction and it's really just about fielding options the whole time. The most important thing by far is casting, because it's the easiest way to make your thing just not work. But I really did not know if it was going to work until we were shooting that opening scene. I was like, "This could potentially be the most embarrassing L of my whole life," because again, I'm coming off doing hot shows that make it look like I'm legit.

It's so funny to hear you say that, because you have the hardest episode of The Bear to your name.

Thank you. It's so rewarding when people are affected by the thing that you work on. That's the best feeling ever. And I think going into doing this movie, it's easy to feel like, Was I only able to do anything because I had this larger support structure of all these people who did actually know what they were doing?

But that was the big experiment of doing this movie, period—Do I have something of my own to say and will I be able to be the person who decides on what the idea is?

The stakes of this film are that one wrong decision can get you out of a room forever. And in any given scene, there's like three people doing a lot of stuff with their eyes and very small facial tics. You see the gears turning, which is really fun to watch but also requires a really layered performance. There's a lot that's going unsaid where you're trying to figure out what the motivation is and what the consequence was in any given scene.

Exactly what you're saying is what me and my DP were thinking about going into it. Maybe there's a lot going on, but what is the true simplest thing that's happening here moment to moment? Who's looking at who, and what are they thinking? I feel like my DP does a really good job of just being enmeshed in the scene. I really appreciated the limitations of our resources, because you don't have time and you don't have money, so what is this scene going to be if you only have one setup, or you only have two setups? There's this scene where he brings his friend to the house party. You think that they're going to haze him and then they just immediately like him more. We could have shot that scene like a dinner scene where it's like, Let's get everyone's reactions, let's get everyone's entire performance. And obviously, you have to shoot that single camera for 10 hours or something to get it all, and that shit gets stale to perform.

But we were like, This scene is about Matthew's feelings. So if we only have one setup for this, let's tag some of the people on the way, and then let's land on Matthew's face at the end of the scene. Everything else is just happening off-screen and starts to become this cacophony of being socially overshadowed.

And then you really feel that. I mean, it helps to have an actor like Theo where you know you can hold on that and it's going to work, and we're going to know what he's thinking and feeling and it's going to be interesting to watch. But so much of that was really about me and my DP getting on the same page about what the scene was about and what it should feel like. I don't know what lens we're putting on the camera half of the time. I'm a writer, so I had to lean on all of these people who had 10 movies under their belts. I was the person on set with the least set experience. There's PAs on there who have been on set for longer than me.

We talked a lot about the specificity—was there someone in or around the industry that you showed the film to whose approval really reassured you?

I was actually more interested in a random 60-year-old who has never heard of Frank Ocean, what their understanding of this movie is going to be. Because I knew on the fundamental level that the specificities of it were going to make sense to the If you know… people pretty easily, but actually, even if it is specific, it needs to make sense to someone who doesn't care about any of this shit. Much of the movie is finding the balance between the specificity of the world and the universal evergreen nature of the story. We wanted to make it feel like a movie that could have come out 50 years ago.

The other thing is I specifically set it in 2018 because we know what that is. If we were trying make a movie right now about 2025, we would probably miss the mark or it'd feel dated.

It would be like throwing a dart at a moving target.

Yeah, totally. But we all know [2018] was like. It’s crystallized. I think about how both The Social Network and Uncut Gems are seven-year period pieces. They came out seven years after the year that they take place, so it's just funny that this ended up being a seven-year period piece. I feel like it's the exact amount of time that can pass for you to be like, "Yep, that is what that time was like."

And even now watching Eddington, it's right on that edge of that—it’s a hyper-modern period piece and it still feels like it's so painful for people. It's like, I'm not ready, I need two more years for this. And that's why it's cool for [Ari Aster] to just say, "Fuck it, I'm doing it."

Thinking about all this game that you're soaking up from all these different places: You’ve worked with Jeff Schaeffer, and with Lee Sung Jin and the Storers. What’s something you took away from each of those experiences that you then put into your debut-album film, so to speak?

From Sonny [Jin’s nickname], who did Beef, I learned that there's no such thing as overthinking. If you have the time and if you have all the stones to look under, look under them until you find the thing that you're looking for. And I feel like the Storers taught me that the most important thing is that the thing has to feel alive. And both of those are, in a way, ways to think about writing and ways to judge your own thing once it's on the monitor.

But you can't always articulate what you took from something. It's just like I got to watch how people moved when they were in this situation of making this decision or that decision. And that's the best education, just being in the room when something happens or when a decision is made, because that's all you're doing when you're directing, is making decisions. You ask people what they think, but at the end of the day—oh, I have to tell you this Baz Luhrmann thing.

Okay, so Baz Luhrmann, I met at some point during this process because he knows Archie, and he was like, "Do you want my advice?" So he wrote it in my notebook. It was like, "Listen to everyone and then go into the corner and listen to yourself."

And I feel like that is so useful, because you really do need to feel out, Is this making sense? Is this working? Is that funny? Are they just saying it is? Is it not? Do they not get it? You have to always be feeling out everyone's reactions, and you have to care about if someone's bullshitting you, because we're in the land of the best bullshitters, the best liars. So you have to have a good sense of what someone's agenda might be in telling you something's good or something's bad, and then you still need to have your own gut feeling at the end of it. It can just be informed by what people are saying. It's kind of crazy. It makes you crazy, thinking about all this shit all the time.

You just completed this Herculean effort that took years and years of your life… are you thinking about the second feature? Or are you thinking about going back to some rooms for some interesting shows you want to get on?

I've got 40 pages of another movie. I really don't want to get caught up in the release of this. I really want to distract myself by writing the next thing. I'm curious if I've fucking grown at all. Hopefully I can write something now that's not about 20-year-old clout chasers in LA. It's not my life. I am curious: What is trying to find a life, what's trying to come out of me now? Those are, I think, the stakes. I feel like the worst thing that could happen is I jumped the gun and I'm like, "Oh, well, I'm going to take this first opportunity to do something that I haven't," just to give me that feeling.

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