“I still don’t understand the play,” Jason Schwartzman’s character says at a key moment in Asteroid City. Apparently, he’s not alone.

Wes Anderson’s latest confounding Rubik’s cube of a movie, is a play within a TV show within a movie. It’s a story of a small group of people making contact with an alien, but it’s also a story about the making of a stage play. Ultimately, it might be a story about grief, and love, and how the cosmos are too big and vast for humans to even try to comprehend.

It might be the most Wes Anderson movie ever — a film about processing big, messy emotions through a layer of artifice to make them easier to digest, or at least, easier to ponder.

So Inverse asked the cast of Asteroid City what they think the play is about. Dive in as they attempt to break down Wes Anderson’s puzzling sci-fi film.

It’s good to be busy, but Paapa Essiedu is starting to reach his limits.

“I haven’t slept much, which is why the beauty sleep is very much needed now,” the 33-year-old London-born actor tells Inverse.

Essiedu is calling in from Milan, where it’s already late in the evening. (He’s there working on something, but he won’t tell me what.) Maybe a couple hours of shut-eye will help with his current problem. Then again, maybe not. “It probably will take more than beauty sleep to rescue me from the brink.”

But the thing about Essiedu, a consummate performer perhaps best known for his role in HBO’s I May Destroy You (the introspective Kwame, a young Londonite navigating his sexuality), is that he is the kind of artist who deserves to be busy. For all the work he’s been putting in, Essiedu is finally bursting onto the scene in a big way. In 2022, he broke out in a trio of genre-infused projects: Alex Garland’s folk-horror movie Men, British mystery thriller The Capture, and sci-fi series The Lazarus Project.

Finally, in 2023, the world is about to fall in love with Paapa Essiedu through a somewhat unlikely vehicle: Black Mirror. He stars in the final episode of Netflix’s latest batch of stories, a departure of form from showrunner Charlie Brooker and co-writer Bisha K. Ali (Ms. Marvel) called “Demon 79.”