Exclusive: Jerskin Fendrix on Drawing ‘Provocative Sounds’ Out of a 90-Piece Orchestra for ‘Bugonia’

In film auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming film Bugonia, Emma Stone plays the CEO of a pharmaceutical company abducted by conspiracy theorists Teddy Gatz (played by another Lanthimos favorite, Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (portrayed by Aidan Delbis).

The black comedy has already generated plenty of hype thanks to Lanthimos working with Stone after acclaimed films like Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness. For Bugonia, Lanthimos also re-enlisted music composer Jerskin Fendrix, who recorded with the 90-piece London Contemporary Orchestra to give the film a grandiose, intense, and frightening sonic dimension.  

Fendrix tells Rolling Stone India, “It was a 90-piece orchestra in one room, which is a very big sound. And they’re up for playing around, they’re up for experimenting, they’re up for embarrassing themselves musically, which not a lot of orchestras are. So being able to play with an orchestra that has that standard, but also that flexibility, which I was able to draw some more unusual, more provocative sounds out of, was an absolute joy.”

At the center of Bugonia is Teddy’s mission to use Stone’s character as a bargaining chip, believing she’s an alien who lives among humans. “A lot of it’s very adolescent: it’s very thrashy, very angsty, and it’s loud and it’s over the top,” Fendrix points out. “And I think that this is what Teddy is like throughout the film — he’s right about everything, he’s trying to save the world, but he’s so angry and he’s so unable to properly control his emotions. The music is a good mirror of that. It’s very extreme and teenage.”

Fendrix’s score for the Bugonia soundtrack — set to release on streaming platforms on Oct. 31, 2025, with only one track being out so far — is there to, in a way, “reinforce the idea that actually this is a grand global drama,” the composer says.

Paired with the visceral editing by another one of Lanthimos’s longtime collaborators, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Bugonia might just be one of the most out-there projects by this crew. “Although Yorgos Lanthimos’ films have somehow imprinted in them his idiosyncratic world-view, there is a need in each of his films to re-discover this anew, following the particularities of each film… and of course Lanithmos’s developing and expanding vision,” the editor says. Together, they’ve aimed to “immerse the viewer in the subjective and often contradictory world of its protagonists.” Mavropsaridis adds, “At the same time, we wanted to slowly help the viewer reconstruct the bigger picture that not only affects the characters’ predicament, but that will also affect us all with dire consequences, if we are not prepared to change course to protect Earth and our common future.”