Little Boy Blue, your horn-blowing services will not be required at the 2026 Woodstock Film Festival. Tracee Ellis Ross and Ken Leung have that job on lock as the stars of Blow the Horn, which is having its world premiere at the festival on Oct. 17. Directed by Nacho Arenas, the surprise-filled chamber drama strands a trio of couples in a New York City loft where they have to work out their personal issues over the course of one very long day.
Gold Derby has your exclusive first look at the first trailer for Blow the Horn, which features Ross and Leung as one of the three sets of partners-in-crisis. (Watch the trailer above, and see the exclusive poster below.) The other two couples are respectively portrayed by Lake Bell and Joshua Boone, as well as Dallas Roberts and Wrenn Schmidt.
The two-minute trailer outlines what happens after they arrive at this out-of-the-way location for what they believe to be your average group therapy session. Instead, they’re confronted with a series of eight envelopes, each of which contains a question designed to trigger the fault lines coursing through their relationships. And before they open a new envelope, one of them must — you guessed it — blow the horn.
It’s a pressure cooker environment, which is something that Leung knows a thing or two about thanks to his acclaimed role on the much-loved HBO financial world thriller Industry. “Any dramatic scene has some degree of pressure, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the greater the pressure, the greater the enjoyment,” the actor tells Gold Derby when asked about what attracts him to those kinds of intensely dramatic scenarios. “Do athletes always enjoy championship games more than regular season games? Pressure informs focus, and that’s fun, but quiet, wandering moments are also fun.”
Blow the Horn‘s contained setting came at a fortuitous time for Ross, who just wrapped up her Broadway debut in the Tony-nominated one-person show, Every Brilliant Thing. “In many ways, it felt like the complete opposite of live theater because the environment was so incredibly intimate and there wasn’t the same element of novelty, performance, or improvisation,” the Emmy-nominated Black-ish star tells us.
“What did feel similar was the creative bubble we were all in,” Ross adds. “The fact that basecamp was in the same space we were shooting in and eating in — and that it was freezing cold outside — invited us all into an emotionally shared space that really supported the material.”
Asked what they enjoyed the most about working together for the first time, Leung remembers being surprised and thrilled when Ross agreed to join him for a duet of “Endless Love,” a song immortalized by her mother, Diana Ross, in between takes. “She made me feel as if I was the only person who had ever asked,” he adds.
“Working with Ken felt like a masterclass in discovery and trust,” Ross responds. “I don’t know if he does this in every role, but he had this incredible way of finding a piece of lint on the floor, a safety pin, a paperclip, a tiny piece of paper, and turning it into a character trait or behavior that informs his choices in a mind-blowing way.
“There was one tiny piece of something he found at the beginning of production that I kept asking him about,” Ross continues. “He used it throughout the entire shoot in scenes — it would disappear and re-emerge. When we wrapped production, he had saved that piece of plastic and gave it to me in a jewelry box as my wrap gift. He knows how to imbue things and people with so much.”
Audiences at Woodstock and beyond should anticipate some significant plot twists as Blow the Horn unfolds, and both stars remember being caught off guard by those developments as well when they read the script for the first time. “You instantly want to start from the beginning again,” Leung teases. “It’s also poignant in the sense that a contract is broken between reader and story — suddenly and violently — echoing what happens in certain relationships.”
“What was incredibly interesting about playing this role was that there were three different layers of truth, all of which were contradictions to the story we were telling, and all of it had to be true at the same time,” Ross echoes. “I think that is what offers the many surprises for the audience.”
