Stephen Carlile Makes American Feature Film Debut in PERFECTLY GOOD MOMENT

For three-plus years, Stephen Carlile has played the villain Scar in Broadway's The Lion King. Carlile portrays David in the upcoming independent feature film Perfectly Good Moment, a psychological thriller that shot in New York City this summer, and is now in post-production. Carlile also served as a Producer on the film, which is his American feature film debut.

In August, he will return to rehearsals for The Lion KING in anticipation of their reopening date of September 14th, 2021. When the show suspended production back on March 12, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Carlile hunkered down in his one-bedroom 42nd Street apartment, just down the street from the NEW AMSTERDAM Theater. He entertained his neighbors by singing Broadway classics such as "On The Street Where You Live" out of his apartment window. And during the pandemic, he appeared in the Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration TV Special.

Originally from Bath, England, Carlile was in the West End productions of The Producers (Original London Cast), and The Phantom of the Opera, and he played Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the Cameron Mackintosh directed production of My Fair Lady for the National Theatre. On screen, he was in 2008's Brideshead Revisited.

In Perfectly Good Moment, Carlile plays the film's lead, a suave financial advisor, with a dark streak. While the film begins as a relationship drama, Carlile's character quickly reveals himself as a malignant narcissistic who has methodically isolated his on-again-off-again fiance Ruby from her family and friends.

New York City native Amanda Jane Stern portrays Ruby. Stern also wrote the screenplay. For her, this screenplay was unique in how it allowed her to "pull from personal experiences and stories from friends and peers to inspire the conflict between David and Ruby."

Recent film and television credits for Stern include the Urbanworld Film Festival award-winning feature film 1 Angry Black Man, the short film The Lost Weekend (with co-stars Reed Birney and Stranger Things' Catherine Curtin), and Lifetime's Amish Witches: The True Story of Holmes County.

She co-wrote the story with Julian Seltzer. Stern and Seltzer's previous collaboration, Coerced, an NPR-featured documentary play about a case of forced confession to a non-existent murder, was produced at the Spingold Theater in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Perfectly Good Moment marks the narrative feature debut for director Lauren Greenhall. She was drawn to the project because it eerily echoed a relationship in her early 20s with a 40-year-old man. Greenhall admits that her story "is a dime a dozen, and yet it's a very rare thing to see it from a woman's point of view on the screen," and she wants Perfectly Good Moment to "give a lot of women a new way to process their past experiences, as well as get some of the SATISFACTION of the revenge fantasy."

Based in Brooklyn, Greenhall has directed TV and video for CBS Interactive, National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Post, and Amazon Originals. During the pandemic, Greenhall directed and created the Miss Quarantine Pageant, a scripted comedy parody of traditional beauty pageants featured by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NY1.

Perfectly Good Moment is produced by Phaedra To Black, LLC.