Adam Lambert, Emilia Jones, Scoot McNairy, Cody Fern & Fairyland Director Interview | Sundance 2023

In writer-director Andrew Durham’s feature directorial debut, Fairyland, Emilia Jones plays Alysia Abbott, a young girl being raised by her single father in the ‘70s. Based on the memoir of the same title, and author and real-life Alysia, Fairyland tells a “parallel coming-of-age story,” as Durham describes it, of the father-daughter relationship between Alysia and Steve Abbott (Scoot McNairy), a man navigating the queer community of ‘70s San Francisco, and all the new freedoms it has to offer. While simultaneously raising his daughter and attempting to experience his new life, Steve encourages Alysia to embrace her passions, while doing the same. Though her childhood was filled with love from her father, as Alysia gets older she begins to feel her family’s otherness. Wanting desperately to fit in and carve her own life for herself, Alysia heads off to college, first in NYC and then abroad in France. It’s during this time in the ‘80s, when AIDS tragically swept through the gay community, that Steve cal