David Corenswet & Isabel May Kick Off ‘Mr. Irrelevant’ Press Tour at the 2026 VMAs

Christmas is still three months away, but David Corenswet and Isabel May clearly aren’t in the mood to wait for it. The two co-stars of the upcoming football drama Mr. Irrelevant turned Sunday night’s 2026 MTV Video Music Awards into the unofficial launch party for their film — walking the red carpet together at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, posing for the cameras as a pair, and then taking the stage as presenters during the show. It’s a bold move for a movie that doesn’t open until Christmas Day, but honestly? It’s the kind of move that tells you the studio has real confidence in this one.

Corenswet and May have quickly become one of the more interesting on-screen pairings in this year’s movie slate. He just spent 2025 wearing the most famous cape in pop culture. She spent the last few years narrating the entire Yellowstone universe and, earlier this year, joined one of horror’s biggest franchises. Put them together on one of music’s biggest nights, and you’ve got the kind of cross-audience moment that marketing departments dream about.

An Early Start to the Press Tour

Let’s be real: most movies don’t start their promotional blitz three months before release. Trailers, talk shows, junkets — that machinery usually kicks into high gear about a month out. But Mr. Irrelevant is already ahead of schedule. The first trailer dropped online on September 13 and immediately started making the rounds in theaters, and now the film’s two leads are out in front of a live television audience of millions.

Corenswet and May walked the VMAs carpet together on Sunday, September 27, looking every bit like the co-leads of a film their studio wants you to remember. They didn’t just pose and leave, either — both were tapped as presenters during the broadcast, hosted this year by Snoop Dogg. That matters. Presenting slots at awards shows are currency; they put faces in front of viewers who may have skipped the trailer and, crucially, attach names to a title months before opening weekend.

Paramount Pictures, which is distributing the film, clearly sees the VMAs audience as the right crowd. It’s young, it’s online, and it’s exactly the demographic that showed up for Corenswet’s Superman and May’s Scream 7. When your two leads are already famous with that audience for completely different reasons, you don’t let that go to waste.

The True Story at the Heart of the Film

So what is Mr. Irrelevant actually about? The short version: it’s the true story of John Tuggle, a running back for the New York Giants who was selected with the very last pick of the 1983 NFL Draft — the pick that traditionally earns the nickname “Mr. Irrelevant.”

Except Tuggle refused to be irrelevant. He fought his way onto the Giants roster and played 16 games during his rookie season, defying every expectation that comes with being the draft’s afterthought. His coach that year was Bill Parcells — played in the film by Michael Shannon — who was himself beginning his first season as an NFL head coach. Two men, both with something to prove, both starting at the bottom of the league’s pecking order. You can see why a screenwriter would fall for that setup.

The story doesn’t stay a simple underdog tale, though, and this is where the film’s Christmas release starts to make emotional sense. In 1984, Tuggle was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 1986, at just 25 years old. The Giants honored him by wearing his No. 38 on their helmets during the 1986 season — the same season the franchise went on to win the Super Bowl. It’s the kind of ending that sounds like Hollywood invention, except it actually happened.

The cast around Corenswet is stacked with character-actor muscle. May plays Katie, Tuggle’s love interest — the “newfound love” at the center of the official synopsis, which describes the film as the story of a man who “defied expectations on the field and off for his then first-year head coach, Bill Parcells, his newfound love, and his team, proving that remarkable hope and perseverance can transcend even the greatest challenges.” David Krumholtz co-stars as Julius “Whitey” Horai, and the ensemble is rounded out by Tuwaine Barrett, Thaddeus LaGrone, Alexander England, Spencer House, and Tandi Wright.

Behind the camera, the film is written by Nick Santora — best known for creating the hit series Reacher — and directed by Jonathan Levine, whose credits include 50/50 and Warm Bodies. That combination is telling: Santora brings the muscular, audience-friendly storytelling, and Levine brings the tonal control to handle a story that swings between football-field triumph and genuine tragedy. The film runs 125 minutes, was produced by Skydance Sports alongside Blackjack Films and Megamix, and shot on location around Melbourne and Geelong in Australia, with local stadiums doubling for 1980s NFL venues.

From Superman to the Last Pick of the Draft

For Corenswet, Mr. Irrelevant is about as far from the Fortress of Solitude as you can get — and that seems to be exactly the point. The 33-year-old actor spent the last year carrying James Gunn’s Superman, a role with enormous scale, enormous expectations, and about eighty years of cultural baggage. Playing John Tuggle is the opposite bet: no cape, no powers, no built-in fanbase. Just a real guy who ran hard and loved harder and died far too young.

Corenswet has talked about what drew him to the material, and his answer wasn’t about football at all. “What happens when a person who has defined himself by optimism and resilience is faced with a losing struggle?” he said when the first look at the film was revealed. “Can grace and dignity and humor and love transform failure into its own kind of success? These are the questions I thought were asked by John’s story and I think are asked of each of us at various points in life.”

That’s not the language of a guy cashing a superhero paycheck. That’s someone hunting for the kind of role that actually says something — and doing it while his post-Superman career is still taking shape. Before the cape, Corenswet built his name the slow way: Ryan Murphy’s The Politician, Ti West’s horror prequel Pearl, HBO’s gritty Baltimore drama We Own This City. Each role a little bigger, a little more serious. And he’s not done stretching — he’s set to head to Broadway next year for a play revival, because apparently film and television weren’t enough of a challenge.

The VMAs appearance fits a pattern, too. Corenswet has been quietly everywhere this month — trailer drop, press rounds, now a red carpet with his co-star — and each appearance is calibrated to remind people that the Superman guy can do other things. Very human, very grounded things.

Isabel May’s Moment Keeps Growing

If Corenswet is the established name on the poster, May is the one with the steepest upward trajectory in Hollywood right now — and Mr. Irrelevant might be the role that finally puts her in front of the widest possible audience.

Her story is one of those slow-burn ones that suddenly caught fire. Born November 21, 2000, in Santa Monica, California, May spent three years auditioning without landing a single role before she and her parents pulled her out of traditional school so she could focus on acting full-time. Six months later, she booked her first job: Katie Cooper, the loyal best friend on Netflix’s Alexa & Katie, which ran from 2018 to 2020. It was sweet, it was wholesome, and it showed exactly zero of what she was actually capable of.

The range started showing in smaller projects — a recurring spot as Veronica Duncan on CBS’s Young Sheldon, the indie thriller Run Hide Fight, the horror experiment Let’s Scare Julie, the rom-com I Want You Back. Then came the role that changed everything: Elsa Dutton, the fierce teenage heart of Taylor Sheridan’s 1883. May didn’t just act in the Yellowstone prequel — she became its voice, literally, narrating the follow-up series 1923 and returning for the closing moments of the Yellowstone finale itself. For fans of that universe, her voice is the franchise’s conscience.

And then, this past February, she walked into an entirely different universe: Scream 7, where she plays Tatum Evans — the daughter of Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott, horror’s ultimate final girl. The character’s name alone is a love letter to franchise lore, borrowed from Rose McGowan’s ill-fated Tatum in the 1996 original. Here’s the fun part: May had never actually seen a Scream movie before she was cast. Talk about trial by Ghostface.

Her dance card beyond Mr. Irrelevant is genuinely packed — the sci-fi horror Menace, the romantic comedy Love Language, the romantic drama Falling, the thriller The Last Mrs. Parrish. But Mr. Irrelevant is different from all of them. It’s her first major theatrical film role as a co-lead, opposite one of the biggest new movie stars on the planet, in a true story with real emotional weight. Katie isn’t a final girl or a frontier teen — she’s the love story at the center of a tragedy, and that’s a kind of acting muscle May hasn’t fully shown yet.

Why the VMAs Move Makes Perfect Sense

Step back for a second and the strategy here is actually pretty clever. The VMAs audience is not, traditionally, a football-movie audience. But it is a David Corenswet audience and an Isabel May audience. Between Superman, 1883, 1923, and Scream 7, these two have spent the last two years collecting fanbases across about four different genres. Putting them on a music awards stage is a way of saying: whatever you know them from, here’s what they’re doing next.

There’s also the timing. With the film landing on Christmas Day, the campaign has a long runway — and long runways need early moments that stick. A VMAs red carpet in September is the kind of thing that lodges in people’s feeds, gets the photos circulating, and plants the title in the back of everyone’s mind. By the time December rolls around and the posters are on every bus stop, Mr. Irrelevant won’t feel like a new title. It’ll feel like something you’ve been hearing about for months. Because you have.

And frankly, the movie could use the goodwill. The Christmas corridor is always crowded, and a sports drama — even a true one, even with this cast — has to fight for attention against whatever franchise behemoths are parked on the same weekend. Starting the conversation in September, on one of television’s loudest stages, is how you make sure people are listening.

When Mr. Irrelevant opens in theaters on December 25, it’ll arrive carrying one of the strangest and saddest true stories in NFL history — a kid picked last, who played like he was picked first, and who never got to see how it all turned out. If Sunday night’s VMAs appearance is any indication, Corenswet and May are ready to make sure nobody calls this story irrelevant again. We’ll see them — and the film — at Christmas.

Source: Just Jared