Ramin Bahrani’s next film just got another notable addition. Tessa Thompson is set to co-star opposite Mads Mikkelsen in Last Meals, joining a cast that already features Boyd Holbrook and Michael Shannon as the project moves toward cameras rolling this fall.
Mikkelsen leads as Walter Karat, once a chef at the White House, now relegated to preparing final meals for inmates on death row after a professional downfall. His routine gets disrupted by Reed (Holbrook), a prisoner who won’t eat and won’t engage, no matter how hard Walter tries. What starts as resistance slowly turns into something closer to friendship, and Walter starts to wonder if Reed was wrongly convicted, a question that pulls him into digging up the case’s buried truth.
Thompson steps into the role of Hannah, a hungry local food critic who gets swept into the unfolding drama, while Shannon plays Governor George Callahan, whose clemency power puts him at the center of the story’s political stakes. As Walter, Reed, and Hannah’s search for justice starts drawing national attention right in the middle of a contentious presidential race, Walter is left weighing a return to culinary stardom against staking everything on a fight that might cost him that comeback entirely.
The territory isn’t unfamiliar for Thompson. She just wrapped her Broadway debut this spring in The Fear of 13, playing a prison volunteer who develops a deep bond with Nick Yarris, a real-life man exonerated after spending 22 years on death row, opposite Adrien Brody. Last Meals puts her back in strikingly similar terrain: a death row inmate, a question of innocence, and an outsider whose relationship with him becomes the emotional core of the story.
The script, written by Justin Piasecki (Relay), won the Academy Nicholl Fellowship before landing at Sentient Entertainment, which is producing with HanWay Films running international sales. Producer Renée Tab, an Emmy, Golden Globe, and PGA nominee known for Dead Ringers, Feud: Bette and Joan, and Sound of Freedom, is also currently an executive producer on Bahrani’s Vegas: A Love Story, which is in post-production.
International sales are already well underway. HanWay has closed deals across Japan, the Benelux region, Australia and New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Singapore, Greece, the Middle East, the Baltics, Portugal, and the former Yugoslav territories, with buyers including Synca Creations, Paradiso, Transmission Films, Vertigo, Pathé, and others. Forum Film Ltd. picked up a separate bundle covering Israel, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, while Skeye handles inflight distribution. Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia are covered through Vuelta and Scanbox, respectively. Domestically, UTA Independent Film Group and WME are working the North American sale alongside Sentient.
Producing the film alongside Tab is Charles Porter, repping Black Bench Productions, Blessed From Above, Hoss Productions, and Miller Way. Mikkelsen, Bahrani, Piasecki, Thompson, and Holbrook are all attached as executive producers as well.