Highlights
- Todd Haynes says Pedro Pascal’s gay romance De Noche will most likely get an R rating, not the NC-17 once expected.
- Haynes promises an emotional 1938 love story about the armor of masculinity, without making the visuals prurient.
- The film wrapped in April after Joaquin Phoenix quit in 2024, and it still has no release date announced yet.
Pedro Pascal‘s gay romance is still coming in hot. Just not NC-17 hot.
Todd Haynes told France’s Lumière Festival that De Noche will “most likely be an R-rated film,” adding that he saw no need for a leering visual style. That’s a cooldown for a project fans have been bracing to see land an NC-17.
Back in 2023, Haynes pitched it to Variety as a love story between two men in the 1930s with “explicit sexual content.” He had openly anticipated the NC-17.
Pascal plays volatile LA cop Richard Rent opposite Danny Ramirez as schoolteacher Joe Thomas, two men who become targets of the city’s corrupt political machine and flee to Mexico. Haynes calls the setting an era “all too relevant to our own.”
He argues anyone can relate to the story, but says the emotional defenses men build are a uniquely male burden, and the 1938 setting adds its own cultural walls.
Getting here was a disaster. Joaquin Phoenix bailed five days before production, reportedly with “cold feet.”
Producer Christine Vachon didn’t sugarcoat it on Facebook: “It has been a nightmare.” Haynes put it even more bluntly to Euronews: “And so De Noche 1 fell apart.”
Then Pascal swooped in. MK2 Films stepped up to finance, the shoot moved to Mexico City, and filming wrapped in April 2026.
Vachon now frames it as destiny, saying “this was a role Pedro was born to play.” She called both Pascal and Ramirez “a revelation.”
There’s still no release date. Pascal already has the vintage suit and fedora. Now somebody book the theaters.
