Kirsten and I have gotten messages from people saying, “It’s been tough for me where I live. I wished my mom could watch something that wasn’t centered around a coming-out story, that shows we’re okay. But I also have seen and understand the critique that it was made for straight people. On one hand, I saw Love, Simon with my mom. The plotline is not centered around coming out, or the trauma that might come with that. So this script was such a place of joy, where being queer was celebrated and you could be the most popular girl in school. For a big portion of our population, that’s not the reality. And Miller High is such a different place than many high schools in the United States. King: There’s so much anti-LGBTQ legislation right now. What does it feel like to have written a film so many people needed as kids, knowing it’s still necessary today, in the era of “Don’t Say Gay” bills?
And I know both of you, and director Sammi Cohen, have discussed that, too.
I couldn’t help thinking about my high-school self, and what watching this movie would’ve meant to me. So there’s little pieces of both of us in all the characters’ stories. Casey has a queer sister, I had twin best friends on the track team when I was in high school, and I grew up with a single mom. King: When we were first talking about this story, we set up a big whiteboard, drank a martini, and asked, What commonalities do we have in our high school experience? And we found track, and being queer. Are there any moments from your own lives that inspired moments in the film? It’s so exciting that people responded to it, because it came from such a place of passion. We said, This may never sell, but this may heal some part of our high school selves that needed this. And we were asking, Why don’t we have this for queer people? We have been projecting our romances onto straight people’s stories for our entire lives. Kirsten King: It was 2018, we had just watched To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, we were constantly rewatching 10 Things I Hate About You, Love & Basketball, some of those early-2000s, late-’90s rom-coms. We were both obsessed with rom-coms, and then there was that fateful moment, like in a movie, where we make eye contact and are like, “Wait… should we?” What was your path to writing this story together like?Ĭasey Rackham: We met at BuzzFeed, and then we started a queer writers group together. TIME spoke with the Los Angeles-based screenwriters about writing the rom-com they needed as high schoolers, the value of streaming, and what queer storytellers in Hollywood owe one another. In writing Crush, the first-time screenwriters and former BuzzFeed colleagues hoped to offer another slice of the experience-their film is designed to be comfort food for queer people, envisioned through the lens of the genre they both love. More LGBTQ+ stories are being told on screen than ever before, and many of them center around the fraught experience of coming out, an important but limited view of everything it means to be queer. “We wanted a rom-com where they all just happen to be extremely queer,” Rackham says. And for screenwriters Casey Rackham and Kirsten King, sticking to some of the tropes of the genre was part of the point. It’s supposed to be a little over the top. If it all sounds a bit convoluted, that’s because it is-it’s a teen rom-com, after all.
And all at once, Paige finds herself working with AJ to unmask a mysterious artist who’s been spray-painting school property, trying to figure out how to run more than five feet without falling on her face, and maybe just learning what love feels like. But the coach pairs Paige with Gabby’s sister AJ (Cravalho) as a training partner instead.
Paige decides her longtime crush on popular track team co-captain Gabby (Isabella Ferreira) is the ideal inspiration, and an ultimatum from the school principal forcing her to join the team provides the perfect opportunity to get to know Gabby for real. It follows Paige (Blanchard), an awkward lesbian artist attending the somewhat utopian Miller High, who’s tasked with distilling her “happiest moment” into a painting for a college program application. In an era of increasingly discriminatory and violent anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and rhetoric, Crush, out today on Hulu, offers viewers a blissful hour and a half of smart, sweet, queer escapism. In a lot of ways, Crush, a love story starring Rowan Blanchard and Auli’I Cravalho, is like every other teen rom-com-and that’s part of what makes it exceptional.