Blackflies in Cannes: A brutal dive into NYC paramedics with the star of Ready Player One like you’ve never seen before!

From an early age, Ty Sheridan worked with the greatest. The Texas native turns just 15 alongside Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.

The following year, he rolled back the red carpet for Mud: On the Bank of the Mississippi with Jeff Nichols and Matthew McConaughey. Tye Sheridan then excelled in David Gordon Green’s Joe, a film for which he received the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Newcomer at the Venice Film Festival.

Since then, Tye Sheridan has gained international fame playing Cyclops in several X-Men films, but also for Steven Spielberg in Ready Player One. In recent years we’ve seen him alongside Paul Schrader in The Card Counter and George Clooney in The Tender Bar.

Impressive Tye Sheridan in a shocking and intense thriller

Now, at the age of 26, he’s back at the Cannes Film Festival for Jean-Stephane Sauvière’s Black Flies, selected in Official Competition. The actor plays Ollie Cross, a young New York paramedic who teams up with Rutkowski (Sean Penn), an experienced emergency room doctor. Faced with extreme violence, he discovers the risks of a job that daily challenges his beliefs about life and death.

Jean-Stephane Sauvière’s film, whose plot is close to Martin Scorsese’s open grave, is intended to be very dark, with a suffocating rhythm, deafening atmosphere, but also with a deep humanity.

And we can say that we will discover the other side of Tye Sheridan in this intense and immersive drama that forces us to live an exhausting experience for two hours in the chaotic environment of New York paramedics and emergency workers. Unlike his previous roles, the 26-year-old delivers a stunning and powerful performance.

Meet Ty Sheridan at Cannes told us it probably was “The most fragile character to play” :

“I think it really has the most intense setting in the real world. I think as a young person, dealing with your own trauma and the death of someone close to you and carrying that crushing weight around all day is hard. Being inexperienced in it. I think it’s very overwhelming. My character is very It’s overloaded and becomes very fragile. In a way, the film works on a very psychological level for him as well. And it’s kind of a hellish spiral.”

To portray this young medic, Tye Sheridan immersed himself in extreme training. With the film in production since 2018, Black Flies has taken some time. But this long wait allowed the actor to be effective on set:

We knew we had to look like real doctors in the film. So Sean and I trained for two and a half months before filming, shadowing real doctors, spending time in the classroom and practicing with them.

Since 2018, I have been going to New York with Jean-Stephane and doctors. So there was a lot of training involved and we had a lot of support from a lot of doctors in New York, including the team at Wykoff Hospital. We always had counselors on set when they were having medical procedures.”

Adapted from the novel 911 From former Harlem paramedic Shannon Burke, Black Flies also counts Katherine Waterston, Michael Pitt, Raquel Neve and Mike Tyson in its cast.

The film Black Flies does not have a release date in France yet.