If your Tuesday needs a few more severed heads than usual, you’re in luck: the new trailer for Al Pacino’s Oscar Wilde double bill of Salomé and Wilde Salomé is here. The play has long been a passion project for the shouty actor, and there’s plenty of excellent Pacino ranting (“I got four days to shoot a 90-minute play!”) for those who like that sort of thing. In the title role is one Jessica Chastain. Her performance predates Zero Dark Thirty and The Tree Of Life, though it was purportedly this play that brought her to the attention of one Terrence Malick.
The original play sees the titular Salomé, daughter of King Herod, cultivate an obsession with John the Baptist, leading to dancing, pining and beheading. As Wilde himself wrote, “One should not look at anything. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Unless it’s the trailer for my play, which one can watch below.”
The films are an intriguing mix of narrative and documentary – Salomé being a more straightforward adaptation of the stage play, while Wilde Salomé is an account of the efforts to make said play. The latter won the Queer Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and is something of a spiritual sequel to Pacino’s 1996 documentary Looking For Richard, his rumination on Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Visit Empire's Al Pacino viewing guide for much more on the acting great.