'Loving' Trailer: An Interracial Couple Fights For Justice in Early Awards-Season Contender
Of all the American films that premiered at this past May’s Cannes Film Festival, perhaps none received as enthusiastic a response as Jeff Nichols’s Loving, a based-on-real-events romance starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. Already one of this year’s most highly anticipated award-season releases, the film will aim for Oscar glory when it premieres in theaters this November — and ahead of that debut, it’s now delivered its first trailer.
In Loving, Edgerton (who also starred in Nichols’s Midnight Special) and Negga play the real-life Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple — he’s white, she’s of African-American and Native American descent — who, in 1958, traveled from their home in Virginia to Washington, D.C., in order to get hitched. Upon returning to their hometown, they were arrested for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and eventually barred from living in the state. Their ensuing battle to fight this intolerance-fueled prosecution led them all the way to the Supreme Court, where their unanimous-decision victory forever marked race-based marital restrictions as unconstitutional.
Related: Cannes Report: ‘Loving’ Earns Praise for Its History-Making Love Story
Nichols’s retelling of this powerful love story earned considerable praise from critics when it was unveiled at Cannes, with Variety’s Peter Debruge claiming that it featured “two of the best American performances of the past several years.” Yahoo Movies’ own Kerrie Mitchell had similarly glowing things to say about its headliners, writing: “The movie is remarkable in its restraint and understated grace… Edgerton is terrific…. It’s Negga, though, who leaves the biggest impression. An Ethiopian-Irish actress… Negga has huge eyes that register every emotion, and she gives Mildred an indomitable will beneath her mild, warm exterior.”
Co-starring Nichols’s favorite leading man, Michael Shannon, as a Life magazine photographer, as well as comedian Nick Kroll in a rare dramatic performance as one of the ACLU lawyers who argued the case, Loving arrives in select on Nov. 4, before expanding nationwide.
