From Embers is a dark and twisted story about love, loss and parenting — but Matthew Morrison says the film is not what it seems.
“If I’m being totally honest with you, isn’t the trailer kind of like, ‘What is this movie about?’ In a good way,” Morrison, 45, exclusively told Us Weekly while promoting the film’s upcoming theatrical release. “It kind of makes you think a little bit. I was like, ‘I don’t [know] … [I’m] not sure.’”
The Indie film centers around Lily (Kara Wang) after she moves next door to Marty (Morrison) following the death of her husband, who perished in a lab fire. While waiting for her husband’s insurance policy to pay out — and raising their son alone — Lily starts to question whether his death was an accident.
“I keep seeing the same car. I think it might be following me,” Lily tells Marty in Us’ exclusive first look at the new trailer. She later notes, “Nothing about the fire makes sense.”
Marty admits it “sounds like a lot” as he and Lily appear to get closer. “I don’t think it was an accident,” Lily confesses elsewhere in the trailer, before a man yells on the phone that “the wife is becoming a problem!”
In the trailer, Lily vows to get a “copy of that patent filing,” declaring, “And then I am going to sue them.”
Marty — a musician struggling with alcoholism while raising his 13-year-old daughter – is all in on Lily’s mysterious quest.
“I want to be a part of whatever you’ve got going on,” Marty tells her. Lily, meanwhile, concludes that she’s “not waiting anymore for someone to do the right thing.”
While the trailer focuses on Lily’s journey, Morrison told Us that after reading the script he realized that “at the heart of the story” is a “father daughter bond.”
“It’s the innocence in [his daughter’s] eyes that I feel keeps him grounded, even when his will is crumbling,” Morrison explained of his character. “He’s this musician who never really quite made it and he turned to coping mechanisms such as, you know, alcohol instead of facing the shame and guilt head on in his life.”
Marty’s separation from his wife leads to even more problems. “There’s also this pain of watching your child grow up in another man’s world under another man’s influence,” Morrison continued of his character’s story line.
The Glee alum explained that throughout the movie, viewers will learn about the “ongoing pandemic” of society’s complicated relationship with love.. For Morrison, he said the film’s “deeper dive into humanity” was one reason he decided to sign onto the project.
“Exploring the darker side of someone who is going through a lot of pain and not knowing a way to connect with that pain [is fascinating],” he told Us.
Morrison teased that Marty’s desire to find healing leads to a “connection with someone else who is kind of going through her own trauma,” referring to the character Lily. “Sometimes we think that will help us when we have this shared trauma, but that’s not always a healthy foundation of a relationship,” he added.n
When it comes to Marty and Lily’s bond, Morrison hinted that their relationship does not go as planned. “This is a story about what happens when love turns into something toxic,” he said. “When two struggling people come together thinking that they’re going to save each other, but they end up kind of pulling each other down instead.”
From Embers debuts in select U.S. theaters later this month.
With reporting by Kat Pettibone
