By
NATASHA WOLFF
Photography by
MATTHEW SPROUT
Styling by
BRIE WELCH
lm e
SUMMER 2022
64
DUJOUR.COM
SWEET HOLMES WHILE MOST OF US WERE BAKING BANANA BREAD, K ATIE HOLMES PRODUCED, WROTE, DIRECTED AND STARRED IN A FILM
M
ost people came out of the pandemic with not much to show for themselves save a few new bad habits and maybe a larger waistline. Katie Holmes wrote and directed a movie—her second. Alone Together had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and will be released in theaters and on demand on July 29. In the movie, Holmes, now 43 and a full-time New Yorker herself, plays a food critic who leaves Manhattan just as COVID-19 has begun to shut down the city. She heads upstate to an AirBnB that was reserved by her boyfriend (Derek Luke), only to discover someone else, an artist (Jim Sturgess), is already living there. But this isn’t a horror movie; it’s a romantic one. Though at first they’re the odd couple, sparks begin to f ly after being stuck upstate. Holmes tells the story with a whimsical economy of scale that replicates the trapped feeling many New Yorkers felt during the early days of the pandemic. Holmes illuminates this feeling of isolation while also suggesting it’s a shared experience. In essence, we were all “alone together.” “I was intrigued how it would play out working with a co-star that was also the writer and the director of the project. I’d never experienced that on set before,” Sturgess told DuJour. “But it turned out to be incredibly freeing and exciting. The three main people that I would need to communicate and collaborate with were all wrapped up into one person, and that person was right there in front of me, and thankfully was hugely open and generous.” For Holmes, there was a steep learning curve despite having been on sets for the last 20 years. “I’m always learning, and you’re just trying to figure out how to tell a story in every department,” Holmes said at the Tribeca premiere. “Doing it all at the same time is a little tiring.”
