The cinematic theme of women pulling one over on men doesn’t stop with the Jennifer Lopez-led 2019 film Hustlers. In 2020, audiences will get to meet their new, totally relatable anti-hero: a millennial loaded with crippling personal debt.
Buffaloed tells the story of a determined New Yorker named Peg Dahl (played by Set It Up's Zoey Deutch) who is always looking for a way to come up. Since she was younger, Peggy has been involved in harebrained scheme after scheme, and she finds herself behind bars when one plan goes spectacularly south.
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Once she’s out, Peggy finds a new path in the debt collection business. She sets out to establish herself as a leader in the shady industry and makes a few enemies along the way. Directed by Tanya Wexler, Buffaloed is a tale of ambition and money — much like The Wolf of Wall Street, a film Brian Sacca, Buffaloed's screenplay writer, also happened to appear in.
Much like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Jordan Belfort, Peggy is fixated on using money and power to buy her way into a better life, but unlike Belfort, she’s much younger and far more chaotic in her methods (we see her brandishing a gun and kicking a man in the groin at some point). She's messy and more than a little weird, but she's doggedly determined to make something of herself by any means necessary.
Deutch spoke to Refinery29 about her role in the indie film, connecting instantly to Peg's diamond-in-the-rough character. "She is an anti-hero," the actress said of her Buffaloed protagonist. "A completely unapologetic, unafraid anti-hero...written in such a fun and funny way.”
Director Wexler sees a lot of Peg in Deutch (without her obvious disregard for the law, that is). "You rarely get such a perfect marriage of an actor to a role,” said Wexler. "There is something natural about that character with [Deutch] that came through. The most research we did was thrift store shopping — getting who this character was and her personality through her look.”
Fall in love with Peg and her unstoppable hustle in Buffaloed when it hits in theaters on February 14, 2020.