Fans might have to wait a little longer to see if Julia Garner ends up playing Madonna in a biopic, but they don’t have to wait to see Garner and Madonna collaborate on film.
The Ozark and Americans alum has a quick cameo in a club scene in Madonna’s star-studded Confessions II visual album, which premiered Friday night to a theater full of screaming fans at the Tribeca Festival in New York.
The more-than-10-minute short film, which is set to the first six songs on Madonna’s upcoming Confessions II album sees the Queen of Pop being chased by a SWAT team of robot-like women carrying cameras as she moves from an apartment (hiding “in the shadows” as she sings on “I Feel So Free”) to a forest, where she dances with a number of scantily clad women and men with “lasers coming out of every orifice” (indeed, thin green lights shoot out from between their legs), to driving a car, to a nightclub to a very crowded bathroom, where Madonna and her celebrity friends (she teased that this scene features the most Easter egg-like cameos) have a dance party before she brings the celebration home.
Throughout the film, directed by David Toro and Solomon Chase (TORSO), which is set to premiere on YouTube on Monday, Madonna is joined by a number of famous faces including Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate Moss, Odessa A’zion, Debi Mazar, Gwendoline Christie, Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe and “Bring Your Love” duet partner Sabrina Carpenter. Daughter Lourdes Leon is the last celebrity cameo as she ends the film with, “Cut, bitch.” Madonna later revealed that Leon and she co-wrote a song on the new Confessions II album.
The Garner cameo though isn’t the only way Madonna’s new visual album is connected to her much-anticipated biopic, the status of which is still up in the air after Garner was set to star as the Queen of Pop, and Madonna insisted she would be writing the screenplay.
While Garner last summer said the film is “supposed to still happen,” it was shelved by Universal in 2023. However, Madonna in 2024 said she was working on the script again. It was also announced last year that she’d teamed up with director-producer Shawn Levy on a limited series project at Netflix.
Madonna said in a post-screening Q&A with TORSO and Anderson Cooper, filling in for announced moderator Jimmy Fallon, who couldn’t make it, that she started making the Confessions II album, which she’s been working on for a year and a half, while she was waiting for her movie to come together, thinking she’d make a dance record in the meantime.
And then, at longtime manager Guy Oseary’s suggestion, she decided to make a short film to accompany the first six songs on the album, with the self-proclaimed cinephile explaining that she chose film because the format has “inspired [her] life.” And she found the idea of a film more impressive than a “video,” which she said “seems cheap.”
“It was good when it was just me and MTV,” she added.
Madonna said she quickly thought of TORSO as the directors for the project, who said they came up with ideas based on what they saw when they closed their eyes and listened to the lyrics. The duo said in their first meeting with Madonna, which started around midnight, they spoke about what she was feeling and where she wanted to transport people. And while she didn’t say no to anything they pitched, she was “suspicious” about some things, they said.
“I never would’ve imagined lasers coming out of girls’ pussies,” Madonna said, adding it was TORSO that came up with the strategically placed lasers in the forest scene. “I really wanted to try but apparently they get quite hot,” she joked.
Cooper introduced Madonna to the packed Beacon Theater by recalling the experience of being at a club in New York and hearing a rumor that Madonna was coming.
“Motherfuckers, Madonna is here tonight,” Cooper said as he introduced the Queen of Pop to an audience of screaming fans, who gave her a standing ovation as she took the stage. For his part, Cooper bowed Madonna and then gave her a hug.
After waiting past the event’s initially delayed 9 p.m. ET start time, the fans started clapping and chanting for Madonna during the ads that ran before the film before her face appeared on the screen. Throughout the first of two showings of the film, the fans cheered when she appeared onscreen and for the various celeb cameos. For a second screening, after the Q&A, at Madonna’s instruction, the fans were quiet so they could listen to the lyrics.
Attendees were forced to place their phones and electronic devices in Yondr pouches, which Madonna appreciated.
“Cellphones come between people,” Madonna insisted, adding that people are too busy capturing what they’re doing.
“I came to Earth to be a doer not a watcher,” she added and shared that while she adored her time onstage with Carpenter at Coachella, she was bothered by the sea of cellphones, insisting she couldn’t look into anyone’s eyes.
At the Tribeca event, Madonna was still riding high off of her surprise Times Square concert on Thursday night for a crowd of 50,000 people. After that performance, which was followed by the release of her new single, “Love Sensation,” Cooper wondered if she would be touring to support Confessions II, which Madonna would neither confirm nor deny.
Saying she “never want[s] to repeat [her]self,” she mused that it might be fun to emerge from a cube in a warehouse for a rave. Someone suggested a residency at the Sphere, which she dismissed as not wanting to wake up to Las Vegas every day.
The Times Square performance, Madonna said, was another full circle moment, recalling how when she first arrived in New York she asked a cab driver to take her to the “center of everything” and he dropped her in Times Square. Performing to the large crowd, she thought, “I’ve made it,” she said.
So what is next for Madonna? After the Tribeca panel, she said, she’d be driving out to the Hamptons to visit her 95-year-old father for his birthday.
The Confessions II visual album hits YouTube on Monday, June 8 at 11 a.m. ET/ 8 a.m. PT and the Confessions II album itself comes out on July 3.