Dylan Sprouse fans: please listen up because your favourite arty, mead-brewing boy is in a new short film that sees him not only return to the hotel suite, but also wearing a beautiful pink dress. The film is from young director Christian Coppola, yes of relation to the famous director family that includes Francis Ford Coppola and Sofia Coppola, and is called Daddy.
The film, which looks super sweet and touching from the trailer below, stars Sprouse alongside Tony award-winning actor Ron Rifkin. Sprouse plays a male escort who has been hired by an 80-year-old man to celebrate the anniversary of his wife’s death. The former Suite Life of Zack and Cody star can be seen exchanging tender embraces with his client, yeah, this one is gonna make us cry.
The short film “subverts power dynamics, exploring love, desire, seduction, and death,” according to a recent interview with Sprouse and Coppola. Sprouse explains that while the film’s hotel setting is quite a fitting scene for his return to acting—it was filmed two and a half years ago—he didn’t actually think much about it.
“The setting really never crossed my mind in terms of its relevance to my past,” he said, while in conversation with his director. “I was really more concerned with what the story was saying. Christian, we discussed in other moments what might accidentally seem like an homage to what I was doing in the past, and we stayed away from it.”
Where to watch Dylan Sprouse’s short film Daddy
Watch Daddy on YouTube here, courtesy of the director Christian Coppola. You can also catch Sprouse now in two feature films he’s recently starred in. The subversive rom-com Banana Split and the angsty YA romance After We Collided.