Ben Whishaw on the power of Peter Hujar’s photography: ‘It feels alive’
The actor reunites with director Ira Sachs on a new, experimental biopic about the iconic photographer. Here, they discuss why his work still resonates today
Published January 5, 2026 in Dazed. Text by Nick Chen
Peter Hujar’s Day (Film Still) Courtesy Janus Films
Ben Whishaw is a notoriously private person. Nevertheless, I’ve started our interview by asking the 45-year-old British actor how he got out of bed the previous day. “Yesterday, I woke up at around 7:30, but I knew I wanted more sleep,” says Whishaw. “I had a sense of excitement, because I’d had a really busy few days leading up to that morning, and I was like, ‘Ah, I don’t have to be anywhere.’ I turned over and lay in the dark for another half an hour. I got up and made myself a coffee. I didn’t have any breakfast. Maybe a handful of nuts.”
It’s a Thursday afternoon, on December 4, 2025, when I meet Whishaw and the 60-year-old American director Ira Sachs at the Londoner Hotel. Their latest collaboration after 2023’s Passages is Peter Hujar’s Day, a genre-defying film that’s neither documentary nor fiction. On December 19, 1974, the celebrated queer photographer Peter Hujar described his previous day in great detail to Linda Rosenkrantz, a writer who recorded and transcribed their conversation. With Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as the leads, Sachs’ film recreates that day’s events – not the day described, but the describing itself.
The result is hypnotic and deceptively simple: for 70 minutes, it’s a dialogue that focuses on the photographer’s previous day and nothing else. The action, if you can call it that, never leaves Rosenkrantz’s New York flat, except for smoke breaks on the balcony. It’s full of tantalising contradictions: a wordy, stagey piece that’s cinematic through grainy cinematography and avant-garde cutaways; an immersive, grounded drama that’s so Brechtian it ends on an applause break.
“It’s important to state emphatically that I had no mission to introduce people to Peter Hujar,” says Sachs. “It’s really about two actors on a set who are transmitting this conversation between Peter and Linda.” But it’s a happy accident if viewers discover Hujar’s work? “I like that you’re pushing back, even though I say that wasn’t my intention. On no level would I not want people to discover his work, because his work is a gift, particularly to queer people.”
In 1974, Hujar is 40 years old and ascending in his career. His previous day involves talking to Susan Sontag on the phone, and photographing Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times; he name-drops acquaintances like Fran Lebowitz, William S. Burroughs and Ed Baynard. He frets his day is “boring”, yet his account, including the ordering of Chinese food, is engrossing. It’s ultimately Hujar’s inquisitive energy, not his photography, that’s on display.
Sachs and Whishaw are avowed fans, the latter owning a 1980 self-portrait called “Seated Self-Portrait Depressed” in his home. “His art will always be as if it was made today,” says Whishaw. “It feels alive. He managed to catch an intimacy with people – actually, not just people, but frequently animals as well – where he could get them to be so open to him. When I try to take photos, that exchange is difficult, because lots of people understandably don’t want to be photographed. It’s quite an aggressive act, photographing someone. You’re sort of taking something from them. To encourage someone to feel relaxed, open, and able to be intimate – that was his great genius. And it’s what he saw in people as well.”
Sachs discovered the transcript in a gay book shop in France during the shooting of Passages. By then, the ums and ahs had already been removed. “The transcript is quite musical, exact and verbatim,” says Sachs. “I’m certain when Linda typed it up 51 years ago, she removed several ums. But she did not remove the natural inflexion of how people talk in conversation.”
“I had an impulse to make it more, ‘Oh, let me just find this word or phrase,’” says Whishaw. “But Ira kept saying, ‘Just keep talking.’ It had to have a certain amount of tension in it. It couldn’t just become soggy, meandering language.”
Hujar died in 1987, aged 53, from Aids. Throughout the film, Hujar agonises about his health and mortality; Rosenkrantz pleads for him to eat more vegetables. When Hujar describes closing his eyes and going to sleep, there’s a poetic finality to the statement.
“It’s a kind of literary device,” says Sachs. “We know more than the character, and that his life will end in 13 years.” But he’s agreed to be documented, and is preserving his legacy? “Yeah, but he’s really un-self-conscious, which I admire. His lack of defensiveness and trust in Linda is quite deep. It’s something I could never experience with my own therapist – he seems to totally trust that she’s going to be interested in anything he says.”
Peter Hujar’s Day (Film Still) Courtesy Janus Films
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