‘Leviticus’ Stars Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen on Playing Gay Teens for Conversion Therapy Horror

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Leviticus,” now in theaters.

“I want it to look like you” might be the single most romantic dialogue of the year.

And yes, it’s from a horror movie, namely Adrian Chiarella’s “Leviticus,” which features two gay teenagers tormented by a violent supernatural entity that resembles the person they desire most – each other.

Premiering at Sundance in January to rave reviews and later acquired by Neon for release in theaters Friday, “Leviticus” is named for the Bible verse that condemns homosexuality and set in a conservative town in Australia that does the same.

The film follows Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), who share a mutual attraction, acting on it in the film’s opening scene. Agreeing to keep it a secret due to their homophobic community, Naim later discovers that Ryan is also involved with fellow classmate Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt). Naim ends up revealing their secret to Hunter’s parents, who bring in a pastor tasked with removing “the sin” in the boys. A shocked Naim watches as Hunter and Ryan writhe on the floor in agony post-“cleansing,” as Ryan begins to appear often beat-up and increasingly terrified of Naim throughout the movie.

Something is wrong, but Naim can’t be sure what it is, even after he watches from inside a locked store as Hunter is attacked by an invisible entity and ultimately killed. Eventually dragged to the same pastor by his mother (Mia Wasikowska), Naim finds comfort at Hunter’s funeral with whom he assumes to be Ryan – until the monster begins attacking him. Over the course of the movie, the pair try desperately to solve the mystery of the entity, unwilling to stay away from each other. After all, what crueler (or sweeter) way to die than at the hands of a monster wearing the face of the person you love?

The audience never sees the monstrous version of Naim that Ryan is so afraid of, one that rips his skin apart and bruises him, cementing Naim’s position as the story’s narrator.

“It would have been fun to see,” Bird tells Variety. “But what attracted me to this role is that it wasn’t something I’d done before.” Bird’s breakout role was in the 2022 film “Talk to Me,” where he played a young boy possessed by an evil spirit, allowing his portrayal of Naim to test his skills.

Clausen, on the other hand, had plenty of questions when he took on the double role of Ryan and his lookalike monster, beginning with: “How the hell am I going to portray this thing?”

A large part of figuring out how to play the monster was unpacking the entity itself. “The main question I wanted to answer was: ‘What was it feeding on? What was it after?’” says Clausen. “Is it trying to scare them? Is it feeding off their reactions or trying to get a reaction? What we landed on was that this monster was feeding on their desire and trying to elicit an emotional real response. Once it gets that response, it replaces it with fear.”

Conversations with Chiarella helped Clausen nail down the technical elements of his performance, practicing disingenuous smiles and blank eyes. “We played with how much to show in each scene,” says Clausen. “The more time it spends with the person, the better it gets at imitating” – and so does Clausen.

The first time Naim encounters the entity, it’s at Hunter’s funeral, and the reveal is made within seconds. By the time it approaches Naim at home alone, it successfully coaxes the latter into believing it’s really Ryan, only to violently grab his head through a mesh gate when he approaches. The dance goes on for most of the movie, with Naim — who possesses all the naïveté of a teenage boy in love — continuing to hope the person in front of him is the real Ryan. That is, until the two embark on a bloody chase through the forest and end up in an abandoned mill, where Naim discovers the entity’s one weakness: fire.

Setting the factory ablaze and escaping, Naim pauses for a minute when the Ryan-like monster appears at a window, begging to be released and claiming to be the human-being. After a second of consideration, Naim slams the grate shut to the monster’s wails, and the audience’s relief.

“That’s the conflicting thing towards that end act; that he doesn’t know whether that’s the real Ryan or a trick,” explains Bird. “When the search party [for Ryan] scenes happen, he’s under the impression that he might have actually killed Ryan.”

Despite the countless reasons they should stay apart, Ryan and Naim can’t help but be drawn together, not just out of love but also understanding as the only two queer people in a conservative community.

“This is a church town that they’re in and the majority of the town is obviously against homosexuality,” says Bird. “Young teen love is intense naturally, regardless, but it definitely heightens that sense of ‘This is the only person that I can really be myself around because I can’t even be myself around my family.’”

“The biggest thing that we wanted to portray is that these two boys are really a refuge for each other. They’re the only person in their entire world that they can share this tiny little piece of truth and vulnerability with,” adds Clausen. “Yes, it is a horror, but it’s really a coming of age, and it’s about the relationship between these two boys first.”

One-by-one, the boys lose all of their potential allies: Hunter gets killed by the entity, his sister who blames Ryan for Hunter’s death lures them into a trap to be attacked by local boys, fellow queer “cleansed” teenager Jessica (Shannon Berry) is in no state to help them, and Naim’s mother Arlene is the one who brings him to the pastor in the first place.

“The one line that really stuck out to me when I read the script the first time was Arlene’s line towards the end of the film, where she says, ‘We need fear Naim, we need it to survive,” recalls Bird. “I don’t think everyone believes that — I don’t believe that — but it’s quite interesting, because all of these characters have gone through their own experiences to influence this way of thinking.”

The parents, arguably the film’s first instigators, operate based off fear of their children’s sexuality. When Hunter’s parents call the pastor into town, it kickstarts a bloody and brutal chain of events, one Ryan can’t forgive when he finds out Naim told Hunter’s parents about them.

“What I really loved about every character is that I could understand every decision people would make. Even when it comes to Arlene and she sends me off to the ritual, it’s from a place of love,” says Bird about coming to understand why Naim went to Hunter’s parents in the first place. “These boys are hormonal; they’re going through puberty, not thinking straight, not allowed to be themselves. What is very common in teenage boys is that we don’t speak our emotions clearly and freely, and it often comes out in mixed ways.”

The strength of the onscreen bond between Ryan and Naim is in part due to their actors building up a real friendship before production began. “Adrian really threw us together from the start,” says Clausen. As for what they did to kill time? Gaming when by themselves and escape rooms when made to do so by Chiarella. “At the time I was like, ‘Oh, this is just a fun thing we’re doing,’ but I realized it’s because he wanted us to be scared around each other. Feeling is such a big thing in this film and so being vulnerable around each other when it came to filming, that trust was already there.”

It wasn’t all puzzles and adrenaline in pre-production. Chiarella, who has been open about his experiences as a queer man helping shape the story of “Leviticus,” took Bird and Clausen to Geelong, a small town in Victoria, Australia, that is approximately the same size as the town the film is supposed to be set in.

“Spending time in that environment and just walking through it, it was like being present in the literal environment that these boys live and spend their lives in,” says Clausen, who adds that it helped frame his and Bird’s perspectives of how their characters grew up.

In another pre-production exercise, Chiarella assigned the pair monologues from conversion therapy documentaries. “That really helped us understand the specific context of what these boys are going through, because I’m not familiar with that world myself,” says Clausen. Conversion therapy isn’t an entirely unfamiliar topic to the pair, however. “This generation growing up online, you would just come across it, and it’s prevalent in the news,” says Bird.  “It’s still happening today, and hopefully this film can make people more aware of it.”

The film’s unique and visceral take on the issue was part of what drew Bird to the project, when he was still a Year 12 student at an Adelaide high school. “It was just one of the most raw, authentic, honest scripts I’d ever read,” says Bird, who remembers thinking: “I have to be a part of this.”

Clausen, who jokes they must’ve wanted Bird first since he received the scripts earlier, auditioned for Ryan, Naim, and Hunter and got callbacks for all three. “Initially, it was just like any other project. It’s just this tiny little Aussie indie movie shooting in my hometown. It wasn’t supposed to be…,” Clausen trails off, gesturing with his hands to represent the intensity of the fervor surrounding the movie.

For months now, anticipation around the movie has been building amongst fans of horror and queer media alike. Despite the buzz, Clausen and Bird are remaining healthily skeptical of whether this movie will launch them to overnight fame.

“That’s a foreign concept. We live all the way in a city in Australia, where the artists don’t go on tour, says Clausen. “They just skip the city, no one wants to go to Adelaide! But I guess we’ll see what happens. I’m nervous but excited — just along for the ride.”

While the public reception is a little scary to Bird, too, the pair have loved watching the edits roll in, especially since Chiarella dropped a scene pack on social media ahead of the film’s release. “There’s been a lot of heartwarming things that have happened; people coming up after screenings and saying that they wish they had this film when they were younger and growing up,” says Bird. “That’s all we can hope for.”

There’s been a little discussion online (and a lot of Letterboxd reviews) comparing “Leviticus” to other popular gay media, namely the hit hockey series “Heated Rivalry.”

“Obviously, they’re two very different pieces of media that are trying to say two different things, but I think they’re both showcasing queer characters on screen,” says Bird about different projects being grouped together because of their nature. “If I was to be comparing queer media to other queer media, I think they should be grouped together, because it is a genre, and I want more of it to be met.”

The outright genre label for “Leviticus”— horror — has also been having a busy summer with Kane Parson’s “Backrooms” and then “Obsession,” which became an unprecedented box office hit within the genre.

“I feel really, really lucky that these two films have blown up right before our film’s coming out,” says Bird, who’s “honored” for “Leviticus” to join the line-up. “My favorite thing about it, is one, it’s independent movies doing these crazy things in the horror genre, and it’s also Gen Z that is taking to the cinemas, which is amazing to hear,” adds Clausen.

As a horror movie, the ending of “Leviticus” is even more poignant.

Naim, afraid Ryan is dead, abandons his mother and flees to the bus station to get out of town, where he runs into Ryan, who appears exhausted, battered, and clearly with the same plan. The two leave together, and as Naim begins to doze off on Ryan’s shoulder, he spots the monster in a field. It’s not a jump scare by any means, more of a open-ended reminder that the story isn’t over, set to Frank Ocean’s “No Control.”

People die in horror movies all the time. Gay people die in media all the time, hence the phrase “Bury your gays.” It wouldn’t have been a far shot for either Ryan or Naim (or both) to succumb to the monster, but it was important to Chiarella and the actors that their pair didn’t follow the same fate as so many characters before them.

“There was no early draft of the script where it wasn’t a kind of happy ending,” says Clausen. (For the record: Clausen and Bird like to think their characters got out of Australia, maybe moved to France, got married and had kids).

“There is a bit of that question: The monster is still there, that fear will always follow them,” Bird continues. “But they’re making a choice to be together; to hold on to hope and each other as much as they can.”