A24 and filmmaker Alex Scharfman are ready to shine a new light on unicorn lore with the arthouse distributor’s latest genre release. In Death of a Unicorn, Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) and Paul Rudd (Avengers: Endgame) play a daughter and father who accidentally run over a baby unicorn on the way to an important meeting—one that could make or break their family’s dealings with the dad’s mega-rich employer. The bizarre sequence of events leads to a discovery that could change the world, if it actually gets out of the realm of a mansion in the secluded magical woods.
io9 recently sat down with Scharfman to discuss the film’s genesis, the decision to cast Ortega alongside some of the funniest actors working today, and why satire in today’s world needs to be fantastical in order to be able to laugh at it.
Sabina Graves, io9: So, I’m not usually a unicorn fan, but I think you finally made me a unicorn girly. So thank you for that.
Alex Scharfman: That’s what Jenna said too. Jenna was not into unicorns. I mean, I wasn’t into unicorns until I started researching the movie. But yeah, I think hopefully people are getting a layer of depth that we didn’t know was there for a while.
io9: I get it now. They can be metal as hell. Let’s start at the beginning. What is the backstory on you taking on this project specifically? Because it’s a wild ride.
Scharfman: The idea just kind of came to me; the opening scene sort of splodged in my head somewhere and I don’t really know where that came from. But sometimes that sort of thing happens, where you imagine a scene and you’re like, “Where does that go?” This very naturally just started pulling the thread of like, “Where does that lead?” and “What if someone hits a unicorn with their car?” “What is a unicorn?” Like, what do we bring to that as a people?
io9: When you imagined this happening to a daughter and her father, did you think, “Oh yeah, Paul Rudd would be that dad”?
Scharfman: At the time, no, it was before actors or characters—it was a scenario. And I didn’t know what was going on or where they were going or what it was; [it was] just something that stuck out in my mind. It took me a couple of years to even start exploring it.
io9: Definitely. And it also gave me the vibes of a Kurt Vonnegut short story that takes fantastical elements to tell a very real satire tale.
Scharfman: Can I just say I’m a huge Kurt Vonnegut nerd? And he actually has a story about a father and son in the Middle Ages, which is weird.
io9: Oh yeah, his unicorn hunting story.
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Scharfman: Unicorn Trap.
io9: Right!
Scharfman: Yeah, okay. So you know the story.
io9: Did you actually think about that while you were writing this, or was it happenstance?
Scharfman: That was kind of happenstance to be honest. I have read and have the full Vonnegut anthology. I’ve read every short story he’s ever written. But that one was not one that I was actively thinking of, because the unicorns aren’t actually that big of a central figure in that. It’s more about the father and son.
io9: Definitely with that in mind, obviously you’re a huge fan of satire then. Do you think there are fundamentals to making a satire film like this, especially during a time where literally every day in real life feels like a satire?
Scharfman: It’s funny, when I started writing this, I started outlining it like 2019. And I think fall 2019, Knives Out had just come out and I was like, “Oh, cool, satire.” Obviously, we’ve had a lot of satire lately in a class commentary vein. I think there was something about this that was attractive to me, when I started researching unicorn mythology and unicorn lore, which I think at a certain point I realized was kind of inherently about class and about social structures and strata. But especially the tapestries that we encounter in the movie that are referenced throughout, those are about a lord sending out his court and his minions to go kill a unicorn and bring it back to him so he can possess it forever.
It’s very much about commodifying nature and social hierarchy that allows one person to say, “Go do this for me and bring it back here so I can own something,” which I think is fundamentally about class and satire. I thought the story was kind of naturally asking for that. In terms of the context of 2025, I think when you’re doing a horror satire, the fun of that is being able to do both horror and satire. [They] are genres that live well with metaphors and I think there’s a fun opportunity to align metaphors.
However, I do think that there’s something intentionally unsubtle about the movie that I think is because we live in unsubtle times. And maybe that’s what we do at this moment is, you know, we live in an era when the world’s wealthiest man has an office in the White House; it’s very much like it’s all on the surface. Now I feel like things used to be a lot more veiled and there were certain degrees of decorum or norms that have since been kind of chucked out the window. It felt appropriate to me to make something that was direct and hopefully cathartic, and I certainly thought about the unicorns having a sense of violent restorative justice, which feels appropriate for the moment we live in.
io9: Like the whales versus yachts! Amazing. No, it’s so wild that this just happened to get on that wavelength, because I was dying from Will [Poulter’s] petulant tech bro performance. Because I’m just like, wow, like we’re seeing a person like that all the time now, normalized, but he just nailed that role.
Scharfman: I couldn’t agree more. I’m so lucky Will is in the movie and delivers the performance that he did because I think it’s funny and it’s wild and over the top and big, but it’s also very grounded in this kind of human psychology that I think speaks to a larger degree of, “How do we get here?” What kind of personality type did we as a society develop and foster into existence? This millennial man-child tech bro, these self-styled masters of the universe who think they have all the answers through a degree of bravado and just bolstering forward.
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io9: He and everyone you surrounded Jenna with are the funniest people. So it’s kind of wild to see her up against the bonkers likes of Richard [E.