After largely working in the producer’s chair for a little over a decade, Alex Scharfman has made his feature directorial debut in the form of A24’s wild horror-comedy Death of a Unicorn. The filmmaker originally got his start in the field as a writer on a handful of short films, including his own directed Pᴀssing Thru, before going on to work on the producing side with everything from the Christian Slater-starring horror movie Playback to the Ariana DeBose-led House of Spoils.

For his feature directorial debut, Scharfman has ᴀssembled a star-studded roster of talent to make up Death of a Unicorn‘s cast, namely Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a strained father and daughter who, while venturing to the latter’s boss’ family home, run over the тιтular mythological creature and inadvertently unleash murderous chaos upon them and everyone else. As it explores a dysfunctional family and satirizes the rich, the movie delivers plenty of what its тιтle promises, with Scharfman pulling from a range of mythology and lore to depict them.

Ahead of the movie’s release, ScreenRant interviewed Alex Scharfman to discuss Death of a Unicorn. The writer/director reflected on the creative journey of putting together the A24 horror movie, particularly the “rabbit hole” of research he went down to depicting the тιтular character and the challenge of balancing it with the character development and humor at the heart of it. Scharfman also talks building the movie’s ensemble cast, and why Rudd and Ortega were key in helping audiences ground themselves in the story.

Scharfman Wanted To “Weaponize” Rudd’s Likability To Keep Audiences Guessing

Ortega Agreeing To Join The Film Also Felt Like Getting “Struck By Lightning Twice” For Him

Where some debuting feature filmmakers find themselves working with similarly new or rising actors, Scharfman has put together an A-list cast for Death of a Unicorn, some who include Téa Leoni, Will Poulter, Richard E. Grant and Anthony Carrigan. With Rudd and Ortega serving as the audiences’ grounding point for the film, Scharfman acknowledged he felt “like I got struck by lightning twice in a row” for the two to have agreed to star in the film, though revealed he and Rudd were previously set to work on another film, with a question posed by the star leading to a point of inspiration for the director:

Alex Scharfman: Paul and I had met and spoken about doing another film before that I had written, and I wasn’t directing, and that he was interested in — that was so long ago now. But when we met, he asked me if I ever wrote for specific actors, and I think my answer — maybe a good answer to say, even if it wasn’t — was, “Not yet.” But I kind of took that as an invitation to write him something, so he was always the person I had in mind for Elliot.

When it came to Ortega, Scharfman admitted to being in something of a blind spot regarding her when he was first putting the film together, though had just caught her in Ti West’s X and sent her the script “the weekend before Wednesday came out.” In reflecting on the casting search, the writer/director acknowledged that it was going to be a “tough role” to fill out, given it required “delivering exposition, holding the emotional center of the movie” and, while not technically being the “straight man in the ensemble“, still had to be the character “reminding us of the stakes.”

“Honestly, when I finished writing it, and I got to a place where we started casting the movie, I was like, ‘Holy s–t, who can do this? This is a really hard role, there’s a lot that the role needs to do,'” Scharfman recalled. “I started watching all of her other movies from before that after I saw X, I was like, “Wait, let me go back and study what she’s been up to.” She’s just such an incredible performer, she’s awesome. I was so lucky that she wanted to do this, found the time to do it, Paul, as well. In terms of casting it, I feel very fortunate they both wanted to do it.“

After praising Rudd and Ortega for bringing “so much pathos and comedy and natural warmth” to their roles, Scharfman revealed Rudd’s casting had a secret ulterior motive to work in the movie’s favor, with the writer/director wanting to “weaponize his likability” in order to make it a “much harder road to hoe for the audience” as he does “unlikable things over and over“. Rudd and Scharfman also found a shared love of Force Majeure, which they used as inspiration for “someone who just keeps making bad decisions until, hopefully, they make one right decision by the end of the movie“.

Scharfman Wanted To Use Classic Unicorn Lore To Subvert Audience Expectations

“…The Whole Movie Started As A Rabbit Hole Exploration.”

While premiering the movie at 2025’s SXSW, Scharfman participated in the after-screening Q&A with his cast, in which he explained that part of Death of a Unicorn‘s inspiration came from ideating the film’s opening scene, in which Rudd’s Elliot and Ortega’s Ridley are having a “banal conversation” before hitting the unicorn. He also made note of his general lack of familiarity with the тιтular creatures, further expounding on that with us by admitting when he grew up he “was never really interested in unicorns,” only to find he couldn’t “stop running [my] brain over” the movie’s initial concept.

This, in turn, led to Scharfman embarking on a “rabbit hole exploration” of unicorn mythology and lore, in which the biggest questions he posed to himself were, “What are your ᴀssociations with them?” and “What’s the mythology actually based on?“. The writer/director immediately took notice that society has “a very intuitive understanding of unicorns just from pᴀssive consumption“, noting that the mythology “hasn’t really changed in 2400 years” since the first written account in 398 B.C.. Scharfman also found himself drawn to the works of Jorge Luis Borges, taking particular interest in a quote from Book of Imaginary Beings that translates to “The first unicorn story is almost identical to the last.”

Going from there, Scharfman became further entranced by how unicorns were previously seen as a “panacea” and sought after to cure things, before the past 50–75 years saw people turn them into “these rainbow, Lisa Frank creatures” rather than believing they were real. One of the key eras he found himself looking to was that of the Middle Ages, which he described as being a “major touchstone point” to the movie’s story, particularly the tapestries Ortega’s Ridley finds that she uses to try and warn everyone of the dangers to come from experimenting on the unicorns:

And obviously, it brought me to the unicorn tapestries, which are in the text of the movie. Those were actually tapestries that I had seen as a kid, and totally forgot about when I was researching, and came upon them, and I was like, “This feels like a keystone to understanding the movie.” That was something where we created this lost tapestry in the movie that was an embellishment of the true maiden tapestry. It is tattered, it is only a partial tapestry, they don’t know what the rest of it was. But we kind of expanded that and said, “What if the rest of that missing tapestry foreshadowed the plot of our movie?” So that was a fun [element], to [have] the tapestries informing the story, and that was a fun way for the story to then retroactively inform the tapestries.

Death Of A Unicorn Intentionally Avoids 1 Monster Movie Genre Trope

“…It Ran Counter To The Very Fundamental Nature Of The Movie.”

Having fallen down such a rabbit hole of research, some could have easily leaned fully into the world of unicorns and exposition with their storytelling. For Scharfman, he acknowledged “it was a tricky balance to find” explaining the lore of his world with the dysfunctional family story and rich society satire, though also says “that’s just the challenge of every script“. “Every story has its own challenges, and that was just one of them“, Scharfman explained, “of making sure that that’s there, and it feels like we’re giving unicorns a real sense of specificity and mythology, but at the same time, you don’t want to look at a character who’s buried in a book or representing research over and over again.”

After noting that the inclusion of the tapestries in the film was meant to be a “meta text” and “spine” to avoid overloading audiences with exposition, Scharfman explained one monster movie genre element he sought to avoid with Death of a Unicorn was a character with prior familiarity of the creature at the heart of the story. The writer/director found it “ran counter to the very fundamental nature” of his film, as none of his characters knew “what they were dealing with“, and that it would have “been weird for one person to be like, ‘Actually, I’ve met this unicorn before, and let me tell you about what their deal is.‘”

More About Death Of A Unicorn

A father (Paul Rudd) and daughter (Jenna Ortega) accidentally hit and kill a unicorn while en route to a weekend retreat, where his billionaire boss (Richard E. Grant) seeks to exploit the creature’s miraculous curative properties.

Stay tuned for and check out our previous Death of a Unicorn interviews with:

• Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni and Richard E. Grant
• Alex Scharfman (Post-Mortem)

Source: ScreenRant Plus