A paranoid Antonio Banderas nearly unraveled before “Up Against It” started filming. It happened during the table read.
“My crisis actually was right before shooting, it was in the reading,” Banderas told Casey Loving at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. “When I did the reading, I got really paranoid about everything about myself, basically.”
Director Trudie Styler handled Banderas and calmed him down.
“She got the temper to just fall down and just listen and just caress me in a way that wasn’t hard,” Banderas said. “She gave me a lot of confidence, and that is very important. I need sometimes that from my director.”
In “Up Against It,” Banderas plays Alvaro, a divorced father. His ex-wife, Saffron, played by Eva Birthistle, becomes his reluctant partner again after their daughter Rose’s cancer returns. Doctors tell them a new sibling could be Rose’s best chance at finding a stem cell donor.
Styler said the story took her seven years to develop. She moved its setting from New York to England during the pandemic to explore Britain’s National Health Service. Styler’s connection to the material runs deeper than research, as both of her sisters are nurses. Much of the film unfolds inside a hospital.
Getting the tone right, moving between comedy and heavy medical drama, was Styler’s biggest concern going in and something she and Banderas discussed on their first Zoom call together.
“To get it right in the first instance, I think you have to choose a cast who could be in command of comedy as much as they could the darker side of this film,” Styler said. “The comedy provides this sort of relief system for the audience, to take an exhale from the moments when we’re really suffering for the characters.”
That same trust extended to his co-star. “I think what really helps is when you get on well as co-actors, colleagues, friends,” Birthistle said. “We became friends quite quickly, which really helps. We didn’t really have any personal time, we sort of jumped straight in. But we met beforehand and talked at length about these two people, why were they with each other in the first place, what happened, who they are now.”
“Up Against It” had its world premiere at TIFF as a gala presentation on Saturday.
