The trailer for Four Mothers, a new gay comedy starring James McArdle, has just dropped

BFI has just dropped the trailer for Four Mothers, a heartwarming and hilarious new gay comedy which comes to cinemas later this spring.

The film stars Scottish hunk James McArdle, who viewers might recognise from the recent ITV drama Playing Nice in which he co-starred opposite James Norton, or from his turns in the Saoirse Ronan-fronted films Mary Queen of Scots and Ammonite.

Four Mothers tells the story of Edward, a novelist on the brink of fame in the literary world who simultaneously finds himself living at home full time with his elderly mother as she recovers from a stroke that has left her wheelchair bound and unable to speak.

Edward is surrounded by a group of gays in similar circumstances, whose closest thing to a social outlet is comiserating their unfulfilled lives with each other in the back pew of the church where they routinely take their mothers to mass.

Edward’s cohort of gays, played by Gearóid Farrelly, Gordon Hickey, and Rory O’Neill (aka Panti Bliss, Ireland’s premiere drag superstar and one of the faces of the country’s successful 2015 marriage equality campaign) up end his weekend by leaving their mothers on his doorstep to care for so that they can attend Maspalomas Pride, knowing he is wont to oblige.

The middle aged writer is left to care for both his mother (played by LOST alum Fionnula Flanagan) and his friends mothers, a group of thoroughly uncompromising matriarchs.

The film was directed by Darren Thornton (A Date For Mad Mary), who also co-wrote the film with his brother Colin, who is gay himself.  “I’m not gay, but me and Colin have the same friend group and are sort of part of the same community,” Darren explained to us in an exclusive interview for the latest issue of Attitude. “So one of the first ideas that we had was the idea of it being about middle-aged gay men because we hadn’t seen that before.”

Speaking about the sacred bond that exists between mother and a gay son, Colin posited: “For gay men, we all have the experience where we’ve had to come out to our parents at some point, and for a lot of gay men of a certain age, not always but oftentimes, that experience was quite fraught.”

“I suppose the intensity of that, and then the kind of healing that comes from that experience later on in life, forms a very tight bond between a mother and a gay son that I think is quite different to the bond that a mother has with her straight son.”

Four Mothers is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 4 April.

Issue 363 of Attitude magazine is available to order here, and alongside 15 years of back issues on the free Attitude app.

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