Hailey Gates & Alia Shawkat Get By With A Little Help From Their A-List Friends

Hailey Gates and Alia Shawkat are partners in disobedience. “[We share a] desire to push it a little further than maybe people are comfortable with,” Gates tells NYLON. “That is a pond we like to play in together.” “Totally,” Shawkat agrees. “Because people don’t think girls like to get in trouble.”

The duo first discovered their shared storytelling and comedic sensibilities on the set of Gates’ 2019 short film Shako Mako, in which Shawkat stars as Laila, an actor working in a Middle Eastern replica village on a U.S. Army base with aspirations of hitting the big time. “Creatively, our shorthand as director-actor just hit really fast,” Shawkat says of the project. “Comedy really brings people together,” Gates continues. “When you have a really strange idea of what’s funny [and] someone also does, that’s really electric.” So when it came time for Gates to get her first feature film off the ground, naturally she returned to the well of her creative partnership with Shawkat.

A war satire based on the 2019 short, Atropia marks the latest collaboration between the pair and Gates’ feature length debut as a writer-director. This time around, Shawkat plays aspiring actor Fayruz, who strikes up an unlikely romance with visiting soldier Abu Dice (played by Callum Turner), and co-stars alongside the likes of Chloë Sevigny, Tim Heidecker, Jane Levy, Lola Kirke, and Shawkat’s father, Tony Shawkat. The film premiered earlier this year at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features, but starting Dec. 12, audiences in New York City will be able to finally see the award-winning film in theaters before it expands nationally in January.

Here, we spoke to the actor and director ahead of the Atropia premiere about their partnership and the long list of generous A-list stars who helped make this film possible.

Obviously you’ve been toying with this idea for a while, Hailey. Take us back to when you first got the inspiration for both the short and the feature.

Hailey Gates: I kind of have a career as a bit-part actress, and I wanted to make a television show where I traveled around trying to get strange bit parts on things, making a doc show about it. I had always been really obsessed with these fake Iraqi villages, and I thought maybe I could get a job working on the base as a reporter, because they sometimes hire real reporters to work in the simulation, and nobody wanted to buy that brilliant TV show. So I just became completely obsessed by it and thought I would make a documentary, and then the opportunity to make a short presented itself.

We can't talk about the film without talking about the cast. What was it like working with Chloë Sevigny?

HG: She’s an unbelievably generous performer and such a professional. I’m very lucky to call her a friend. I acted in a short film that she directed, and so she kindly returned the favor, but it was really fun to be with her and Tim [Heidecker] because I just admire them both so much, but they have very different styles of acting. I think she was a little bit nervous about whether she would be funny, and she was totally hilarious.

I also have to ask about Callum Turner. Alia, what was it like being his scene partner?

Alia Shawkat: It was great. I love Callum. We had worked together on a film almost 10 years ago together called Green Room, and we had become good friends. He’s very relaxed, but he comes in with a lot of strong energy, and he’s pretty vulnerable to changing things and just being open to what you throw at him, but he’s very grounded, so it’s a really nice energy to be around just as a person and as an actor. I really like working with him, and he’s pretty easy on the eyes, so that helps.

And the Channing Tatum cameo. How did that come about?

HG: He auditioned, so that was really lucky for us.

AS: He’s a good friend of Hailey’s and mine. I worked with him on Blink Twice, and he’s just a rad guy. He really is a supporter of the arts in a real way. He’s just like, “You’re making your first movie? F*ck yeah, let’s do it.” He was just really supportive and —

HG: It’s a very generous performance.

AS: Very generous. He’s a really comedically gifted actor, just all around. Really, really, really talented. He did us a big, big favor doing that. He came in for the day and, like a real movie star, just knocked it out of the park.

The film was produced by Luca Guadagnino. How did he get involved in all this?

HG: I was on the set of Challengers doing a small part in that movie, and I've known him a really long time, like 10 years. I was frustrated with another project that was having some trouble, and he was unbelievably... I’m going to say generous again, but I feel like I just keep saying “generous.” But this movie was made with a lot of generosity of spirit.

[Guadagnino] was like, “Send me a script in a month.” It was an unbelievable moment knowing that he would be my first reader. It was a very romantic writing process for me because I was thinking about him a lot as I was writing it, and he’s become such an impressive producer. He has produced three movies this year that are all so wildly different and so fantastic, and real visionary films by these other two filmmakers, and so I feel lucky to be amongst them.

It sounds like this film is really a testament to the power of friendship in the film industry.

HG: Well, when you do a lot of small parts and things, you earn some goodwill.

AS: Some people like working with like-minded artists. Lucky for us, our job isn’t like some weird 9-to-5. We’re like, “Do you want to come into this weird world for a day and play?” And if they’re real artists, usually they’re into it.

Hailey, this film ended up going on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. What was that moment like for you?

HG: It was really surprising. They did not give me a heads-up, so I was very shocked and honored. And Celine Song gave me the prize, which was really exciting. She said a lot of really interesting things about the film, which was it was pretty wild.

AS: I saw [Song] and I was like, “Oh, thanks so much for giving us the award.” And she was like, “Everyone just immediately said Atropia. It was that easy.”

What is it about this creative partnership between you two that works so well?

AS: Our sense of humor is really similar. This film in particular — Shako Mako did as well — but this one has, in my opinion, this kind of like, ’30s sensibility to it. The rat-a-tat of the jokes and the humor I find to feel really old school. And that makes me laugh.

So I think our sensibility of humor is what really bonded us, but also so many other things, just like the kind of stories we want to tell. Aesthetically, I really love Hailey’s style just in every sense of the word. [We] kind of get turned on by the same things... so I think we just always kind of mind-melded really quickly, and that’s an intoxicating thing.

How did this film evolve from the short film to the final product?

HG: I went in another research hole and pulled a bunch of things together, and because I was writing it for her, I asked [Shawkat], “What’s something that you have never done before?” And she said, “A romance.” So I knew that was another brushstroke I needed to incorporate for this, which was exciting because it doesn’t seem on paper like a place where romance blooms, but it was really fun to find that in the world.

Now, to take a detour for a quick second: Hailey, the trailer for The Moment came out recently, which you’re in. What was it like working on that project?

HG: It was so fun. I was really excited to go from our movie to another person trying to make their first film. That energy was really exciting.

Did you give [Charli XCX] any tips while you were on set?

HG: No, definitely not. I was just like, “Are you so bored by this?” Because it’s so much waiting around. On a music video, you can talk because it’s not sync, so the energy’s really different.

Can we expect to see any more joint projects with you two in the future?

AS: I hope so.

HG: Oh, my God. I actually just read a crazy article I was going to send to you yesterday.

AS: Oh, my God. That we should make into a movie?

HG: Yeah, it’s about an Iraqi woman. Wait, no, I’m not going to tell you, because somebody’s going to steal it. But there’s a murder.

AS: Of course. Any good story has a murder. So, yes. This is our next project. It’s already in the works.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.