Kristen Stewart and Chris Pine Remember Anton Yelchin in Emotional Trailer for Film About Actor
Anton Yelchin has been gone for over two years, but in a new documentary about his life, he’s not forgotten.
The trailer for Love, Antosha came out Monday, months after the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It follows the life and death of Yelchin, the child actor turned Star Trek star who died at 27 after a 2016 car accident.
The trailer features interviews with many of Yelchin’s collaborators, including fellow Star Trek star Chris Pine, 38, and his Fierce People costar Kristen Stewart, 29. It also includes clips from interviews with the late actor.
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Throughout the trailer, the actor, who played Pavel Chekhov in all three of the recent Star Trek films, credits his parents with his success. “It was like the first thing I consciously said to my folks: I want to do this, I want to make movies,” Yelchin says in an interview.
Anton’s parents, Irina and Viktor Yelchin, are former Russian figure skaters. They moved from Leningrad to Los Angeles when their son was six months old, fleeing the religious persecution they experienced in Russia for being Jewish.
“My mom, I owe her everything for believing in me,” Yelchin says in a clip in the trailer.
When the documentary premiered at Sundance, USA Today reported that Stewart, who worked with Yelchin on the 2005 indie film Fierce People, dated Yelchin when they worked on the film. “He kind of broke my heart,” she says in the documentary, according to the paper.
“I was so kind of baffled by how good he was,” Stewart remembers in the trailer. “I wanted to be better, smarter, cooler, but couldn’t even hang with him.”
The trailer also touches on his work in photography, showing some of the surreal pictures he took. “Certain images, I can’t get out of my mind,” Pine says in the trailer.
“For Chris Pine to be freaked out about what Anton did means it was out there,” Star Trek director J.J. Abrams, 52, adds.
Earlier this year, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yelchin’s parents reflected upon working on the documentary, directed by Garrett Price. Viktor remembered a conversation with Jon Voight, his son’s costar in the short film Court of Conscience. “You have to live. Make a documentary and keep his memory alive,” Viktor remembers him saying.
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At the end of the trailer, Irina explains that the film’s title comes from her son’s signature on the cards he would write to his mother every day. “There’s no gifts better than those,” she says.
Love, Antosha will be released in theaters Aug. 2.
