Movies

Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn escape from New York in A Quiet Place: Day One first look

"Part II" star Djimon Hounsou also returns in this prequel that goes back to the day the aliens came to Earth.

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Published on February 7, 2024 08:00AM EST

The ingenuity of the next A Quiet Place movie lies in the simplicity of its idea: Take the same core premise of the previous entries, but just change the setting. That tweak alone drastically affects the stakes.

John Krasinski’s 2018 horror-thriller introduced the Abbott family, who embraced a life of silence at their rural farmhouse in upstate New York in a terrifying reality overrun by sightless alien monsters that hunt through sound. The story continued in 2021’s A Quiet Place: Part II, but now A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel film and the franchise’s first spinoff, will see how the citizens of New York City, one of the noisiest metropolitans on the globe, fared when these vicious creatures arrived on Earth.

Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o was living in the Big Apple as she prepared to star in this movie opposite Stranger Things breakout Joseph Quinn. “This notion of a quiet New York is one that will arrest many,” she tells EW. “It's an impossible thing to imagine…. When you live there, you block out all the sound quite naturally. You just forget to hear the sound. I realized how hard it would be to survive in a world that required you to be silent in that particular city.”

EW has an exclusive first look at A Quiet Place: Day One. As the title suggests, it goes back to day one of the alien invasion, which Krasinski explored briefly in the opening flashback sequence of A Quiet Place: Part II. With a new story developed by Krasinski and Day One writer-director Michael Sarnoski, we’ll now see how the rest of the world responded to that event. (A more direct sequel to the first two films, A Quiet Place: Part III, was previously okayed for a 2025 release, but the timeline for that development has since changed.)

Nyong’o stars as Sam, a woman who’s on a day trip to New York City when the monsters arrive. As everything quickly goes to hell, she's thrown together with a man named Eric (Quinn). With some reluctance, the pair agree to navigate and survive the city together.

“When you have a family, there is an innate expectation that they will want to stick together,” Nyong’o says, referring to Lee (Krasinski), Evelyn (Emily Blunt), Regan (Millicent Simmonds), and Marcus Abbott (Noah Jupe), who were the main focus of the first two A Quiet Place chapters. “We don't have that in this film. We have these disparate individuals who collide into each other's lives, and it is at a very pivotal time for the world. How do they negotiate survival together? What we get is really interesting — and even surprising — chemistry in the characters that meet each other along the way.”

For his first major role following his debut as fan-favorite metalhead Eddie Munson on Stranger Things season 4, Quinn remains in the business of running away from vicious monsters. “I guess there's a bit of a variation on a theme. Here we go again,” he says. The actor sees Day One as more of an escape movie rather than a survival story. “It’s more of a [character] drama than anything,” Quinn notes. “The script is obviously set in the world that we know, but it's very much a film about these two characters who are lost and trying to negotiate their fates. There are also some wonderful other characters in the film who Sam encounters, but the bulk of it is Eric and Sam in their mutual acceptance of this bleak, more quiet, new reality.”

Some of those other roles are played by Sarnoski’s Pig actor Alex Wolff and A Quiet Place veteran Djimon Hounsou. The actors remain tight-lipped when it comes to how they factor into the ensuing events, but Hounsou’s presence suggests that Day One is also acting as an origin story for his character, a man who helped create a safe haven on a remote island outside the city before Simmonds’ Regan inadvertently brought one of the monsters to their location in Part II.

“It was really lovely to have him be in the film and to carry the legacy of the previous film,” Nyong’o says, coyly. Will we at the very least learn the man’s name, after he was largely referred to as “Man on Island”? “Well, let's just say that this film will satisfy many,” she responds.

Another character is the quiet third lead of the movie: Sam brings her cat Frodo with her to New York, and the feline remains her close companion on this journey. Sarnoski, Nyong'o points out, is clearly a Lord of the Rings fan. "I thought it was really quite apt because he is that companion," she remarks of her animal costar.

Frodo has already changed Nyong'o's life, having single-handedly turned her into a cat person. "Our relationship had a very steep arc," she recalls. "I was afraid of cats when I started this movie. By the end of the movie, I was crying leaving that cat. Now I am definitely a cat mom. I have my cat's fur all over me, and I think of it as a symbol of affection, which I never imagined I would."

A Quiet Place: Day One opens in theaters June 28. See the first look above.

This article has been updated with the official teaser trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One.

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