‘Raymond & Ray’ Director Rodrigo Garcia On Exploring If Parents And Children Can Ever Truly Know Each Other

It sneaks up on you, the title.

Even when presented right next to each other, the names “Raymond” and “Ray” are pretty innocuous. They’re undeniably similar but don’t reveal any malcontent at first or second blush. It becomes clearer when you realize that “Raymond” and “Ray” are half-brothers, tied together by a distant, neglectful father. Raymond & Ray is going to be a challenge for its titular characters.

That is by design, writer-director Rodrigo Garcia explained in an interview with Geek Vibes Nation during the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. 

“I liked the idea that [Raymond and Ray’s] father, probably in one of his many efforts to screw with their heads, had given them the same name,” Garcia said. “It’s not uncommon. I’ve heard cases where men have two families, unbeknownst to one of the wives, and named the children the same names so they wouldn’t confuse the names in different houses. I wanted [Raymond and Ray] to share the burden of the father but have different mothers, to give them some differentiation.”

Raymond & Ray unpacks that complicated family dynamic and plenty of other dysfunction through the brothers’ journey to bury their recently-deceased father. Although estranged from him and each other, Ewan McGregor’s Raymond and Ethan Hawke’s Ray embark on one last request, to dig their father’s grave themselves. The challenging and absurd request opens up a box of lies, betrayals, half-truths, and secrets that further complicate a man that neither brother can definitively say they knew. 

Raymond & Ray was an opportunity for Garcia to examine how well parents and children can know each other. “I think we present different people to different people in our lives,” Garcia said. “Parents have been observing children since they were born, but then children become their own people after adolescence. For children, parents are always a little bit of a mystery. These were the things I was most interested in.”

That cognitive dissonance is key to the brothers’ journey. “I was concentrating on men under great pressure in this situation where the father still challenges them, asking them to do crazy things from beyond the grave.” It allowed space for the two brothers to process the loss, reconnect after years apart, and even find humor in the increasingly insane circumstances of their father’s request.  

Interestingly enough, the humor was not entirely intentional. “I wasn’t trying to write something funny, [even though] I knew some humor was in it. I was concentrating on the extreme behavior.” Instead, the comedy came naturally from the actors and how they approached very straightforward characters, like Sophie Okonedo’s nurse Kiera. “[The cast] found humor in unexpected moments, which was great for the movie.”

The central relationship between Raymond and Ray developed naturally between Hawke and McGregor. After Garcia finished the film’s first draft, he reached out to McGregor, who he directed in 2015’s Last Days in the Desert, for the role of Raymond. In their discussions, Hawke was one of the first actors they thought of for Ray. Garcia and Hawke had served as jurors at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Hawke and McGregor were interested in working together. The film came together quickly after Hawke had the script in hand.

“They leaned into playing brothers very easily and got along immediately,” Garcia said of his two lead actors. “We got lucky with the chemistry because that isn’t something you can create. They did create this attitude towards each other, how they react to each other. I think it brings a lot of fun to the movie.”

It also helped establish a sense of shared history between them as siblings. That connection helps the brothers deal with the extremes of an unhappy, self-loathing father and move beyond him. “Even in good relationships, there are areas that parents and children will never know about each other.” Garcia seems to envision with Raymond & Ray that those gaps aren’t unmanageable, at least if you share a name with someone.

Raymond & Ray will premiere on AppleTV+ on October 21, 2022. 

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