Summary
Following its one-night theatrical release on July 31,The Duelwill be available to stream on digital platforms and On Demand beginning August 16. When Woody discovers that his best friend, Colin, has been having an affair with his girlfriend, he challenges him to a gentleman’s duel to the death. With the rest of their friend group caught up in the mayhem, the film examines the bonds of brotherhood and questions whether love can overpower betrayal.
Dylan Sprouseand Callan McAuliffe play Colin and Woody, with the former also serving as an executive producer. The actors express their excitement over a chance to collaborate with real-life friends, sharing that the movie’score friend groupknew each other before shooting. Sprouse and McAuliffe admit that their pre-established bond made it easier to convey the necessary emotions and caused the onscreen tension between Colin and Woody to feel all the more real.
Dylan Sprouse’s Best Roles Ranked
Dylan Sprouse is a prolific, popular young actor with a wide range of memorable roles to his name, from The Suite Life’s Zack to Big Daddy’s Julian.
Screen Rantchats withThe Duelstars, Sprouse and McAuliffe, about what they would do if caught up in a gentleman’s fight to the death, as well as Sprouse’s role as an executive producer.
Sprouse And McAuliffe Both Saw Themselves In Their Characters
Screen Rant: To start off, what would your first instinct be if your two best friends told you they were going to duel to the death?
Callan McAuliffe: That’s a great question. I don’t know about you, Dylan. I feel like I’d be, first off, pretty excited. I happen to be a fan of stories of dueling, so I’d want to know how serious they were. If I got the drift that they were going through with it, I’d have to really ask them what went on so I could pick a team. I think I’d make a great second. I think I’d be a very good second. I’d be handling the pistols with the utmost care, or swords, whatever they chose, but I’d have to pretend to not be excited about it, I think. [Laughs]
Dylan Sprouse: Platforming off of what Callan said, I would certainly want to get to the bottom of it, but then if they were really serious, I have just a wealth of medieval weaponry in my house.
Callan McAuliffe: You’d be our Patrick in this scenario.
Dylan Sprouse: I think I could provide them anything that they needed to make sure they got it done. I don’t think that I’d want them to do it to the death, but look, when you’re using flails and balls on chain or morning stars, there’s only so much you can prevent.
Callan McAuliffe: That would be a nightmarish duel. A flail duel? Oh my God.
Dylan Sprouse: That would be the worst weapon to choose.
Callan McAuliffe: I feel like with swords, you can go to first blood and there’s a higher chance you’re both going to survive the thing, because even pistols, the old flintlocks, they go wrong all the time, and you can’t really aim them properly. I would do swords so that they both survive, but someone still wins.
You’re both very versatile actors who have worked on all different types of projects, so how didThe Duelhelp you flex new creative muscles?
Dylan Sprouse: First off, Colin is definitely an amalgamation of myself, but also the people I grew up with on Point Dume and surfing. He’s like a California beach rat, at the end of the day. He was definitely a side of the people I know that I wanted to portray. But I would say the creative muscle that was probably being used most for me was just trying my hand at executive producing.
That was something that I was very much not used to doing, so I wanted to see if I could give that a go. On set, I need to choose one or the other. So while we were on set, I was very much focused on acting, and then when we were in the pre and post production phase, I was putting on the producer hat. So it’s been good, but it’s definitely been a new learning experience for me.
Callan McAuliffe: For me, the character of Woody is similar enough to myself that I didn’t have to do too much deep digging to find him. And in many ways, that makes it more fun to play. I’d say the only difficulty that I anticipated was working with long-term friends for the first time and running the gauntlet of all the different rigors of a set and seeing whether or not that corrupts a friendship. That was one of my anxieties, at first, but otherwise, I was mostly just excited to play Woody. In the end, everyone weathered those potentials very professionally, and we’re all better friends for it now.
But that’s always the thing, when friendships that are as yet untested, in a professional environment, you never know what’s gonna happen, if you’re gonna start screaming at each other, if you’re gonna make enemies of each other and duel each other by the end. Otherwise, it was fairly straightforward for me. It was great fun as well, because, obviously, the main cast are within similar age groups and similar senses of humor, and so it ended up being like a bit of a summer camp for me. I didn’t have to put on the executive producer hat, so I was able to just have a good time and play with it to the best of my ability.
The Duel Is Sprouse’s First Executive Producer Role
Dylan, going back to what you were saying about executive producing, what was it about this film, in particular, that made you want to get involved in that side of things?
Dylan Sprouse: I think it was a little bit necessity in the beginning. Platforming off of the last answer, I should say that our very close mutual friend, Luke Roberts, is one of the writer-directors of this movie. And then, Justin Matthews, who is also a very close friend of ours. Without him admitting it, because I don’t think he will, Luke did kind of write the movie with us in mind, so when he approached both of us with the script, it was at a stage where I think they were unsure if they wanted to direct it, or what they were going to do with it. I was like,“Hey, man, I really want to help get this thing going.”
At that point in time, it was a little bit necessity, but for me, it was also in an effort to try my hand and accomplish something, which is a longtime dream of mine, to start making more movies with people who I really love and that I’m actually friends with, and that’s from the cast and crew all the way up to the end. I think that was the biggest thing, and I’m happy to say that it came out the way it did.
We’ve had a really crazy run, from the fact that we filmed this during COVID, and it took us a long time to get it edited fully to the point that we liked it, and then getting picked up by Lionsgate and distributed nationally and internationally. It’s been a pretty wild run, but I do think that it is a good show of working with your friends and making something happen.
So you’ve been waiting a long time for this to come out. I didn’t realize you filmed it that long ago.
Dylan Sprouse: Oh, yeah. It’s been a minute. Part of that has been because the movie has always been good, but we also all wanted to give Luke and Justin their space in the edit and make sure that it was the way that it was. I think one of the biggest mistakes first time directors of features, in the case of these two, make, is that they just want the quickest thing to happen immediately after making a movie.
The problem is that the first movie does kind of dictate a lot of the trajectory of what they do afterwards. We wanted to make sure that that was ironed out, and we wanted to make sure that that was in its perfect stage before it got released. While that was an amount of time, there hasn’t been a day that passed on this project where the work hasn’t been worth it.
Callan McAuliffe: That’s one of the virtues of working with friends, especially something like an independent feature. You can, not necessarily forego the conventions of the industry and the templates of the industry, but you can spend more time honing in on the vision. I imagined that if I was in Dylan’s shoes, producing as well, I’d want it to take as long as it needed to be the best.
The Cast Lived Together While Filming The Duel
Callan, I love the angry monologue you give at the very beginning of the film about how we’re all hurtling into the void. Were you able to get that in one take?
Callan McAuliffe: It’s funny. I was actually quite nervous about that just because it’s probably the most acting that I have to do in the film. It’s the most significant piece that I have to do in the film. I always get sort of nervous acting in front of friends, especially like longtime friends, and so I was nervous. We had the car inside a closed garage so we could control the environment, and having Hart next to me, I don’t remember if that made me more or less comfortable. [Laughs]
But we got what we wanted. We filmed it a bunch of different times. In the end, the one that they used, it doesn’t seem like they’ve chopped it up too much, but I know for a fact that they probably took their favorite pieces from the different takes that we did. I’ve felt l’appel du vide many times in my life, so I can scream about the void for a couple of days, and I had a good time.
Colin and Woody are like family to each other, and you may feel that that bond is there, which makes the tension between them all the more real. What kind of work did you do with each other to capture that relationship in its current state?
Callan McAuliffe: We cooked each other pasta.
Dylan Sprouse: You cooked us pasta.
Callan McAuliffe: No, you also made pasta one night. I remember. You definitely did because there was one night where we had different kinds of bolognese, like three nights in a row, and one of them was yours. One of them was mine. Chicken.
Dylan Sprouse: Oh, that’s right. This is all to say that we all lived together. The four main boys lived together during the production of this. Although we mostly had all known each other prior, I think this was a clever device by our directors to ensure that the chemistry of our friendship looked real. I will say that when you’re genuine friends outside of the shooting, all emotions actually are easier to convey between each other, whether it’s anger, or sadness, or actual friendship on screen, by being friends, that is the first and foremost chemistry that you need.
Because I haven’t experienced this personally, I don’t know, but I’m not actually sure hating your fellow actor will make hate look better. I don’t think that that’s necessarily true. I do think that being friends is the catalyst to actually feeling comfortable enough to get to the place that you need to be.
Callan McAuliffe: I agree. Although I do wonder what the trade off is when you end up such good friends that you spend half the time on set f*cking around and laughing and killing time. It was a tremendous stroke of genius to have us all in the house because it also accomplished the whole COVID bubble thing as well. We were just locked in a psych ward together in the beautiful autumn.
Callan McAuliffe: No, honestly, it was pretty good.
About The Duel
Upon discovering that his best friend, Colin (Sprouse), has been having an affair with his girlfriend, Woody (Mcauliffe) decides that no modern form of revenge could possibly satisfy him. Instead, Woody challenges his closest companion to a classic contest of honor – a gentleman’s duel to the death. When two of their friends join the act, the once inseparable group of men inch closer to the day of destiny and test the bonds of their relationship until the moment of no return.
The Duelwas released as a one-night-only theatrical event in partnership with Iconic Events on June 18, 2025. It will be available on digital & on demand on July 28, 2025.
The Duel
Cast
The Duel is a 2024 film exploring a fractured friend group who navigate betrayal through an adventurous journey. Departing Los Angeles, they travel through a mysterious cave river, confronting cocaine, existential themes, a large pig, and cosmic humor, culminating in an unexpected quest for true love in Mexico.
