Ladies and gentlemen … she got him. This weekend, Deuxmoi broke the news: Doja Cat and Joseph Quinn are dating.
This is like when your most delusional friend actually lands the thing they’ve been making insane scenarios about. Or when the most embarrassing person you know pops up in a functioning relationship. This is proof that if they can do it, anyone can. And the lore with the pop hitmaker and the Stranger Things star is so deep that I can’t help but wish this odd couple well.
If you aren’t chronically online with a brain that’s merely a Rolodex of pop culture facts (it’s getting to be a problem for me — my obsession with Deuxmoi’s Sunday Spotteds has eaten up years of my life at this point and don’t even get me started on my screen time), here’s the rundown on their lore — which started two years ago.
It might seem like a millennium has passed since the last season of the Netflix smash hitStranger Things dropped, but it’s only been two years. With the season’s release, Quinn shot to popularity as the lovable outcast Eddie. Doja Cat was one of many admirers, brazenly tweeting that she thought he was “fine as sh*t.”
The since-deleted tweet is the first record of their courtship. It’s her version of Gatsby throwing a party in hopes that Daisy will attend. She was shooting her shot. It feels crazy that Doja Cat — a viral superstar who inspired a song by none other than other British heartthrob Central Cee — pulls the same tactics as I do by posting strategic Instagram stories. Celebs really are just like us.
However, for a minute there, it looked like the two would never get to this point. In her quest to get her man, Doja didn’t stop at a tweet. She slid into the DMs … of Quinn’s 17-year-old costar, Noah Schnapp.
“Noah can you tell Joseph to hit me up,” Doja asked Schnapp. “Wait no. does he have a gf?” Of course, as a 17-year-old, Noah Schnapp immediately posted this message on TikTok. Despite the familiar tone of her message, it turns out the two didn’t know each other at all — so why was Doja asking him for favors? And asking a teenage boy to be your matchmaker, especially one who barely had any scenes with Quinn, is a strange move — the things we do for love.
This weird moment obviously went viral and resulted in a short feud between Schnapp and the “ Say So” star. Doja accused the teenager of “bullying” her, calling it “degrading,” “exploitative,” and “super embarrassing.” However, after a few TikToks and livestream rants, Schnapp claimed everything was “all good” between them.
We all thought that was the end of it — until recently, when Quinn and Doja Cat were seen strolling arm-in-arm around London. Talk about the long game.
It seems the songstress has been cozying around with the Hawkins heartthrob for weeks. I mean, who would have thought that the brooding, mysterious Eddie Munson from Stranger Things and the bold, boundary-pushing Doja Cat would make such an iconic pair? But you know what they say – opposites attract, and these two are proof that you can manifest anything.
Fans have even started referencing that original tweet to manifest their own dreams — from other celebrities to jobs and even “Mike Faist employment” by calling them “fine as sh*t.” If it worked for Doja, universe, just know I think a Challengers sequel would be fine as sh*t.
A London boy and a pop princess, coming together to create pop culture magic — we’ve seen this story before. Let’s hope this pairing lasts. But even if it doesn’t, the two have started a movement that the internet is calling “ London Boy Fall.”
From Tom Holland and Zendaya to Olivia Rodrigo and Louis Partridge — plus Gracie Abrams and Paul Mescal (yes, we know he’s Irish but the two have been cozying it up around London) — I’m looking up flights to London as we speak.
What’s next for the two stars, time can only tell. Quinn is about to set off on his press tour for Gladiator II (and filming Stranger Things 5, I hope), but the two of them are enjoying a London summer while ushering up London Boy Fall.
Because The Bikeriders is filled with so much death and tragedy, it’s to be expected that writer-director Jeff Nichols might want to throw the audience “a bone.” Even if it’s a bone coated in a subtly bitter taste for audiences who know how to gauge the real meaning behind Benny (Austin Butler) and Kathy’s (Jodie Comer) so-called happy ending. One that, throughout the course of the film, doesn’t seem like it will actually happen (and, in a way, it doesn’t). This thanks to the storytelling method Nichols uses by way of Danny Lyon (Mike Faist) interviewing Kathy from a “present-day” perspective in 1973, after the numerous power struggles and shifts that took place within the Vandals Motorcycle Club since 1965 (on a side note: the photography book itself documents a period between 1963 and 1967).
In the beginning, the motorcycle club was “governed” by Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), who also founded it. The inspiration for doing so stemming from catching The Wild One starring Marlon Brando on TV. And yes, Hardy is very clearly mimicking the “Brando vibe” in this role, while Austin Butler as Benny, his protégé, of sorts, embodies the James Dean spirit instead. Which, one supposes, would make Kathy the Natalie Wood in the equation, with Benny and Kathy mirroring a certain Jim and Judy dynamic in Rebel Without A Cause. Except the fact that Judy was ultimately much more game to live a life of rebellion and uncertainty than Kathy, making a pact with Jim to never go home again (like the Shangri-Las said, “I can never go home anymore”). As for Johnny, he serves as the John “Plato” Crawford (Sal Mineo) of the situation in terms of feeling Benny pull away from him once he becomes romantically involved. Indeed, the running motif of The Bikeriders is the “competition” between Johnny and Kathy to maintain a hold over Benny and influence which direction he’ll be pulled toward in terms of a life path.
While Johnny wants him to agree to take over the Vandals and lead the next generation of increasingly volatile men, Kathy wants him to “quit the gang” altogether and stop risking his life every single day. A risk that exists, more than anything, because of his stubborn nature. This stubbornness, of course, extends to an unwillingness to remove his “colors” whenever he walks into an out-of-town bar that doesn’t take kindly to “gang pride.” Which is precisely how The Bikeriders commences, with Johnny refusing to take off his jacket when a pair of regulars at the bar he’s drinking in ominously demand that he does just that. Johnny replies, “You’d have to kill me to get this jacket off.” They very nearly do, beating the shit out of him and almost taking his foot clean off with a shovel. And yes, if Johnny’s foot had been amputated, he might as well have died anyway, for his life means nothing to him without the ability to just ride. Which is exactly why he begs Kathy, while she visits him in the hospital, not to let them remove it. Fortunately for his sense of “manhood,” they don’t and Benny is instructed to avoid putting stress on his foot for at least six months while it starts to heal.
Advice that seems to go way over Johnny’s head as he decides to show up to the hotel where Benny and Kathy are staying to invite him to attend the Vandals’ biggest motorcycle rally yet. Kathy is appalled by both Johnny’s suggestion and Benny’s eager willingness to accept despite his current physical state. Constantly fearful that he’s going to end up hurt because of how reckless he is with his body and in his actions, Kathy reaches a breaking point when her own life is put in jeopardy as a result of hanging around the Vandals for too long. Continuing to keep the company of these club members even as the club mutates into what someone from the sixties would call a “bad scene.” The infiltration of more cutthroat, sociopathic youths like “The Kid” (Toby Wallace), as well as new members fresh back from Vietnam, riddled with PTSD and correlating hard drug addictions, means that the Vandals is no longer the same entity that Johnny had envisioned when he initially founded it.
The last straw for Kathy happens at another gathering of the members during which Benny ends up leaving in a rush to take one of the OG members, Cockroach (Emory Cohen), to the hospital after a group of new members beats the shit out of him for expressing the simple desire to leave the club and pursue a career as a motorcycle cop. With Benny gone, there’s no one around to protect Kathy from being attacked by another group that tries to force her into a room and gang rape her (this being, in part, a result of mistaken identity because she’s tried on the red dress of another girl at the party). Johnny manages to step in just in time to keep the man from harming her, but the emotional damage is done. Kathy can no longer live a life spent in constant fear and anxiety like this. Thus, she gives Benny an ultimatum: her or the club. In the end, Benny sort of chooses neither, running out on both Kathy and Johnny when each of them tries to strong-arm him into bending to their will.
It is only after hearing news of Johnny’s murder (at the hands of The Kid, who pulls a dirty trick on Johnny that finds the latter bringing a knife to a gunfight) that Benny decides to go back to Chicago and seek out Kathy for something like comfort. For she’s the only one who will truly be able to understand this loss. In the final scene of the movie, Danny asks what happened with Benny after all that. She informs him that the two are now living happily together (having relocated to Florida, as Kathy had originally suggested), with Benny working as a mechanic at his cousin’s body shop. Even more happily, for her, is the fact that he’s given up riding motorcycles altogether. In short, “he don’t hang around with the gang no more.” This being one of many key lines from the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets,” which is played frequently as a musical refrain throughout the film.
That it also plays again at the end of the movie—an ending that, on the surface, seems “happy”—is telling of the larger truth: Benny has lost an essential piece of himself in choosing to give up riding. So, even though Kathy smiles at him through the window and he (sort of) smiles back, the playing of the song, paired with the distant sound of motorcycles in the distance as he stares wistfully into the abyss, makes it seem as though, like the rider of “Out in the Streets,” “His heart is [still] out in the streets.” However, in contrast to the woeful narrator of the song, Kathy isn’t one to acknowledge, “They’re waiting out there/I know I gotta set him free/(Send him back)/He’s gotta be/(Out in the street)/His heart is out in the streets.” Like most women, she would prefer to keep Benny inside their domestic cage, safe from harm. Safe, in effect, from truly living. For there is no purer freedom Benny feels than what he experiences on the open road.
All of this isn’t to say that the ending isn’t “generally” happy. Though that perspective also depends on one’s values. And yes, The Bikeriders makes a grand statement about the sacrifices that are frequently necessary for a relationship to work (and also just to secure a little more lifespan longevity). In Benny’s case, it was giving up the essential core of his identity. Which begs the question: if that’s what it takes to make a relationship work, then can one really be all that happy? Judging from the “sunken place” look on Benny’s face, the answer is looking like a no. As Mary Weiss puts it, “I know that something’s missing inside/(Something’s gone)/Something’s died.” And in place of that is what society refers to as an “upright citizen.”
One wonders, sometimes, if there was ever truly a period in U.S. history that was “golden,” so much as the nation being in an ever-increasing state of decline from the moment it was roguely founded. For while the present set of circumstances befalling the United States has rightfully convinced many Americans that things can’t possibly get more dystopian/reach a new nadir, to some extent, that has been the story of America for most of its relatively brief existence. And yet, starting in the early sixties (circa 1962), it was apparent that the United States was already beginning to experience the symptoms of some major “growing pains” unlike any they had ever known. A seismic cultural shift was afoot, and perhaps one of the most notable signs was the increase in “outlaw” motorcycle clubs across the country.
Such as the one created by Johnny Davis (Tom Hardy), leader of the Vandals Motorcycle Club. An “MC” based on the real-life Outlaws Motorcycle Club that Danny Lyon was a member of from 1963 to 1967 (two years before Easy Rider would enshrine “the culture”), becoming one for the purpose of being able to authentically photograph and generally document the life and times of this “fringe” society. It is Lyon’s book that serves as the basis for Jeff Nichols’ fifth film, The Bikeriders (the same name as Lyon’s photographic tome). And, although Johnny is the founder of the Vandals MC, it is Benny Cross (Austin Butler) who serves as the “true” representation of what it means to live the biker lifestyle: being aloof, mysterious (through muteness) and not at all concerned with or interested in settling down in any one place, with any one person. That is, until the anchor of the story and its telling, Kathy Bauer (Jodie Comer, wielding her best impression of a Midwest accent), shows up one night in the bar where the Vandals hang out. As she retells it to the film version of Lyon, played by Challengers’ Mike Faist, a friend of hers called her up and told her to come by and meet her there.
From the moment Kathy walked in, she said she had never felt more out of place in her entire life. This being further compounded by all the ogling aimed in her direction. Creeped out to the max, Kathy tells her friend she’s going to leave, but is stopped in her tracks by the sight of the muscular Benny standing in front of the pool table. She decides to go back to her chair, waiting for the inevitable moment when he’ll come over and talk to her. But before that happens, Johnny approaches her first, assuring that he’s not going to let anything happen to her. Kathy’s response is of an eye-rolling nature and, when she and Benny finally get to talking, she still tells him she has to go. And she does…but not without being pawed on the way out. So pawed, in fact, that when she makes it back onto the street, her white pants are covered with handprints. Alas, the pursuit isn’t over, with Benny casually walking outside, going over to his motorcycle and mounting it as Kathy watches, realizing that the hordes from the MC are coming out to essentially force her to take a ride with him so as to avoid their wolf-like, unsettling nature.
From that night onward, Benny waits outside her house once he drops her off, sitting on his motorcycle with stoic determination. Which, yes, comes across as even more stalker-y than Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) showing up to Diane Court’s (Ione Skye) house in Say Anything… to hold a boombox over his head and play Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” Even though Kathy already has a live-in boyfriend, Benny just keeps waiting. Irritating the shit out of the boyfriend with his presence until he finally splits in a huff, leaving the door open, so to speak, for Benny to make his move without Kathy being able to have any excuse to “resist” him. Although she starts out by telling Danny that her life has been nothing but trouble ever since she met Benny, with him constantly getting in brawls, being thrown in jail, etc. (indeed, it smacks of the sentiment behind Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”), she admits that they got married just five months after meeting. Thus, her house effectively becomes another home away from home for many of the boys in the club. A hangout where motorcycles parked on the sidewalk vex Kathy to no end as she warns them that the neighbors will start to complain of a “bad element” in the vicinity.
Ironically, of course, the main reason many of these boys chose to join up was because they were deemed a “bad element” based on their appearance alone. As Johnny’s right-hand man, Brucie (Damon Herriman), tells Danny, “You don’t belong nowhere else, so you belong together.” Basically, the misfits create their own “utopian” society where they can at last find acceptance in a world that has otherwise rejected them. As Johnny Stabler (Marlon Brando) puts it to Mildred (Peggy Maley) in 1954’s (or 1953, depending on who you ask) The Wild One, when she asks, “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?”: “Whaddaya got?” In short, these are the men rebelling against everything, including their own effective banishment from “polite” society. (And, needless to say, Johnny is inspired to form the club in the first place as a result of watching this movie.)
While Lyon’s original book documents years going up to 1967, the film version of The Bikeriders goes up to the early seventies, with things taking a shift toward the decidedly sinister as the end of the sixties arrived, and more and more of the types of men joining up were drug users and/or recently returned from Vietnam with the PTSD to go with it. As Lyon himself remarked while still part of the club, “I was kind of horrified by the end. I remember I had a big disagreement with this guy who rolled out a huge Nazi flag as a picnic rug to put our beers on. By then I had realized that some of these guys were not so romantic after all.”
To that point, many who had tried to remain in the “lavender haze” of America’s postwar “prosperity” in the 1950s were starting to realize that maybe capitalism and communist-centered witch hunts weren’t so romantic after all, either. The sixties, indeed, was a decade that shattered all illusions Americans had about “sense,” “morality” and “meaning.” This perhaps most famously immortalized by Joan Didion writing, “The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing persons reports, then moved on themselves.”
Like Didion, Lyon was also part of the New Journalism “movement” in news reporting. He, too, inserted himself into the situation, into the “narrative.” One ultimately shaped and experienced by his own outsider views (like Didion documenting the “dark side” of Haight-Ashbury hippies in 1967’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” quoted above). And what his photos and their accompanying interview transcriptions told the “squares” of America was this: their precious way of life was an illusion built on a house of cards. By a simple twist of fate, they, too, might find themselves as one of these “lost boys” or as one of the women who loved them. And oh, how Kathy loves Benny, even though it’s to her emotional detriment.
With that in mind, it’s no wonder that the musical refrain of The Shangri-Las opening “oooh” in “Out in the Streets” keeps playing throughout the film (because who knows more about biker boys than the Shangri-Las?). A constant callback to remind viewers of the track’s resonant lyrics, including, “He don’t hang around with the gang no more/He don’t do the wild things that he did before/He used to act bad/Used to, but he quit it/It makes me so sad/‘Cause I know that he did it for me (can’t you see?)/And I can see (he’s still in the street)/His heart is out in the street.” This song foreshadowing what Benny will end up sacrificing for Kathy by the end of the film.
Though, ultimately, the sacrifice is a result of knowing that the motorcycle club will never be what it was during its pure, carefree early years. Years that were untainted by vicious, violent power struggles—this most keenly represented in The Bikeriders by a young aspiring (and ruthless) rider billed as The Kid (Toby Wallace). It is his way of life, his lack of regard for anything resembling “tradition,” “integrity” or “honor among men” that most heartbreakingly speaks to how each subsequent generation of youth becomes more and more sociopathic. Whether in their bid to prove themselves as being “better” than the previous generation or merely exhibiting the results of being a product of their own numbed-out time. Either way, in The Bikeriders, the generational divide will prove to be the undoing of both sides, “old” and young.
Incidentally, this might be most poetically exemplified by a scene of Kathy and Benny watching an episode of Bewitched where Dick York is still the one playing Darrin, not Dick Sargent. Obviously, York was the superior Darrin. Not just because he was the original, but because he exuded a sleek, effortless sort of class that Sargent didn’t (though, funnily enough, York ended up leaving the show because of his painkiller addiction, related to the health issues he had sustained from a back injury while filming a movie five years before Bewitched—a meta detail as Benny is also laid up in bed due to his own “work-associated” injuries). The same goes for the old versus new guard motorcycle club members in The Bikeriders.
For sports fans, there’s the Super Bowl. For fashion fans, there’s the Met Gala.
Every year on the first Monday in May, Anna Wintour, reigning editor-in-chief and pinnacle of fashion at Vogue, hosts the Met Gala. It’s technically a charity event to raise an egregious amount of money for The Costume Institute…but in reality, it’s an excuse for the biggest celebrities in the world to flaunt looks from the biggest fashion houses in the world.
All we ever get to see from the elusive Gala is the red carpet, but for about three hours the world circulates photos of outfits…judging like they have degrees in fashion and are the next Joan Rivers. But this year’s theme was especially exciting for me.
What was the 2024 Met Gala Theme?
This year’s theme was Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, with the focus being “Garden in Time.” A “sleeping beauty” in fashion refers to a piece that is only worn once before being stored away forever. These pieces are often tarnished after they’re worn once.
But as always, there’s a theme within the theme. “Garden in Time” implied nods to nature, which would explain the floral prints and natural elements like mother of pearl and wood. These themes also opened the door for sustainability: reworking and re-wearing pieces that have already existed. Not creating an entirely new costume from scratch.
Once these pieces go on display, they can’t be touched again or they’re considered ruined. While many celebrities weren’t wearing original “Sleeping Beauty” pieces, there were references to vintage collections from classic designers like Versace, Alexander McQueen, and, of course, Loewe.
Loewe happened to be the belle of the ball this year. The hottest brand of 2024 (by far) secured high-profile celebrities like Taylor Russell, Ariana Grande, Dan Levy, Omar Apollo, and more. And not only was everyone wearing Loewe, the craftsmanship and detail was breathtaking in every way.
As I continued to watch notable figure after notable figure grace the famous Met staircase, I continued to wonder where every Met Gala icon was? Where was Rihanna and A$AP Rocky? Blake Lively? Hailey and Justin Bieber? Selena Gomez, perhaps? THE Bella Hadid? Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Harry Styles? Billie Eilish and FINNEAS?
Perhaps a few literally slept through the Met Gala this year…but nonetheless, the celebs showed up. And I’m here to critique them.
Best Dressed
Lana Del Rey
Her first Met in six years and Lana Del Rey shines in custom-made Alexander McQueen. She’s on-theme, the embodiment of Mother Nature.
Mona Patel
Of course, this was a Law Roach style. But Mona Patel had, by far, the best dress of the night. The animated butterflies on her arms were magical.
Tyla
Nothing says “Sleeping Beauty” more than a gown made of sand specifically molded to Tyla’s body. She even had to get carried up the stairs in her custom Balmain.
Zendaya
Law Roach, the stylist you are. Zendaya treated the Met stairs as her runway with multiple show-stopping looks.
Kendall Jenner
I mean, the dress literally was only ever worn on a mannequin and fit Kendall Jenner – with no tailoring. That’s fate.
Mindy Kaling
The dress, titled “Melting Flower of Time”, was designed by Gaurav Gupta. It was walking art, stunned.
Harris Reed
Harris Reed is responsible for some of Harry Styles’ most iconic looks…but tonight, they were the moment.
Taylor Russell
Speaking of Harry Styles…Taylor Russell had one of my favorite Loewe pieces. The wood bodice corset contrasted with the gown.
Worst Dressed
Kylie Jenner
I just think she could’ve done more than a vintage bridal look…
Tennis star Naomi Osaka offered her response to Luca Guadagnino’s buzzy tennis movie Challengers on Thursday, sharing her own moves on the court set to the movie’s viral techno score.
On TikTok, Osaka posted a video of herself moving through a tennis serve and twirling her racket with her fingers after writing, “Me after watching Challengers.”
Though the tennis player has no official ties to the hit movie, which stars Zendaya embroiled in a love triangle with Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes previously told Business Insider it was Osaka’s 2018 win over Serena Williams that partially inspired the film.
At the 2018 US Open, then-20-year-old Osaka beat Williams in a dramatic match that was colored by three code violations for Williams, for receiving coaching, racquet abuse and verbal abuse. Williams, outraged specifically by the insinuation that she cheated by communicating with her coach, called umpire Carlos Ramos a “thief” for docking her a point, and delayed the match significantly by disputing with Ramos and the game’s referees.
“Immediately, this struck me as this intensely cinematic situation where you’re all alone on your side of the court and there’s this one other person in this massive tennis stadium who cares as much about what happens to you as you do, but you can’t talk to them,” Kuritzkes said.
After her win, Osaka tearfully told the crowd, which spent most of the trophy ceremony booing, “I’m sorry that it had to end like this.” Earlier in the evening, Williams told her fans to “make this the best moment we can” and “be positive.”
“For whatever reason, it just clicked in my mind,” Kuritzkes continued of his moment of inspiration. “Well, what if you really needed to talk about something? And what if it was something beyond tennis? What if it was something that was going on with the two of you? And what if it involved the person on the other side of the net? How would you have that conversation and how could you communicate the tension of that situation using the tools that are specific to film?”
If there’s one thing the internet loves, it’s a film with a love triangle. We’ve tirelessly argued over Team Edward versus Team Jacob, Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah, Team Stefan or Team Damon, Team (insert attractive young male star) or Team (insert second attractive young male star).
So, when Luca Guadagnino’s latest homoerotic cinematic masterpiece — Challengers — debuted, you knew the world would be hooked. Not only does Challengers offer up steamy scenes, but it includes a recipe for instant success: Zendaya as the female lead, and two rapidly rising young leading men — Josh O’Connor (Patrick Zweig) and Mike Faist (Art Donaldson) — for the world to fawn over.
Yes, it’s Zendaya’s time to be the villain as Tashi Duncan — although the internet’s still debating whether she’s a feminist icon or just plain evil. Already receiving high praise as one of the best movies of 2024 so far — our review was pretty glowing, too.
But I couldn’t help but notice that Challengers solidifies a major shift in the fashion trendscape. Zendaya and her stylist — Law Roach — are known for their emblematic looks that set trends for the following year — and years to come. The verdict is in…luxury athleisure has never been more popular.
Similar to Quiet Luxury made popular by shows like SuccessionSuccessionand It-Girls like Sofia Richie, luxury athleisure gives a money vibe…without the display of labels. Challengers is all about looking like an old-money tennis pro.
Zendaya’s been delivering some killer serves (get it?) in the name of Challengers and Tashi Duncan lately…so she’s our resident style icon for building your luxury athleisure closet.
What Is Luxury Athleisure?
The ultimate goal in fashion of late is to look effortlessly sophisticated and filthy rich, without screaming that you’re trying too hard. That means an emphasis on quality and durability as well as an absence of logo and branding. Black and white color blocking is back in a big way, as are neutrals.
You must don luxury athleisure as if you’re an off-duty professional athlete. But only an athlete in an elite sport like tennis, horseback riding, or something posh like croquet.
It’s about that sweater tied over your shoulders and the wide headband pushing back your blowout. The polo shirt and the pleated skort. Tube socks and crisp whites. Getting the picture?
You see luxury athleisure outfits throughout Zendaya’s Challengers press tour, with clean girl tennis skirt sets and bouncy ponytails. You can perfectly picture her as Tashi Duncan but also catch a glimpse of how to achieve the luxury athleisure trend yourself.
Zendaya’s Challengers Style
The Barbie movie emphasized how fun it can be — and good for ratings — when the lead actress cosplays her character — Tashi Duncan — for press shoots. Margot Robbie constantly churned out Barbie look after Barbie look for every premiere, press opportunity, and awards show.
So when Zendaya followed suit and debuted Tashi Duncan-esque fits…we knew we had a hit on our hands. Some of the style is a literal homage to the sport — tennis ball Loewe heels paired with a custom Loewe V-neck bedazzled dress…or a Thom Browne gown with racquet appliques.
But her other appearances alongside Tom Holland at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells or the Monte Carlo Masters give us insight on the ultimate Tennis-Core closet.
Many of her looks are reminiscent of the 50s and 60s fashion that’s growing ever-popular this spring. Hoop skirts and Jackie O inspired skirt suits have been stellar on the press tour. And then there’s the power jumpsuits that are the epitome of office chic.
And it’s not just Zendaya who has leaned into Tennis Core…it’s one of Taylor Swift’s go-to style moments. TheTortured Poets Department singer loves a good pleated skort…and she’s well known for her cardigans.
In short, Tennis-Core is a mix of Taylor Swift, Zendaya — esp. in Challengers — and Sofia Richie’s style all-in-one. It’s about looking luxurious while being comfy. It’s to convey a highly active lifestyle that pays well. It’s to convey an air of money.
What You Need To Dress Like Tashi Duncan
So now that we want to dress — and live? — like Tashi Duncan, it’s important to emphasize elevated basics that will last you a few years. Luxury athleisure isn’t about fast fashion, it’s about high-quality, luxe materials.
If you want to embody the baller that is Tashi, here are the items you simply must have in your closet.
Cable Knit Sweaters
Zendaya BACKGRID
If there’s one staple item you need to complete the #TennisCore trend, it’s an oversized cable knit sweater. Nothing says old money quite like a collared cable knit. It’s giving “I know how to sail my father’s yacht…and I weekend in the Hamptons.”
Zendaya pairs the cable knit with a white maxi skirt…but these seriously go with anything. I like to combine the classic chunky sweater with a pair of wide-leg linen trousers.
Try these:
Scads of Collared Tops
ZendayaBackgrid
While you don’t necessarily need a notch neck collar in your cable knit sweater…it’s essential for a luxe athleisure look. And luckily, a lot of athleisure brands are throwing collars on dresses, crop tops, and more.
I’m a fan of the oversized collared shirts that you can pull on at any moment.
Try these tops for a Tashi Duncan look:
Pleated Skorts and Dresses
Zendaya Backgrid
If you’re a Swiftie, you know that a pleated skort is Taylor’s go-to. For someone with long legs, nothing shows them off better than a skort with some detailing. Everyone is on the pleated skort trend lately, so you better not miss out.
Skorts also solve the problem of accidental indecent exposure that skirts pose. With comfy shorts — and often a handy pocket — underneath, you’ll never wear a real skirt again.
Preppy Touches
This is all about accessorizing. Thick, sporty headbands are in — hello Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf. And, yes, I think the headband is a marvelous alternative to pulling your hair back with damaging elastics or claw clips.
But the headband isn’t the be-all and end-all. Mules and Mary Jane flats have come back to add a preppy flare…what’s next? Sperry’s?
If you want a few preppy accessories, here are my picks:
Uniqlo vs. Loewe
Let’s be honest. These two brands dominated the court in Challengers. If it wasn’t a Loewe look, the actors were sporting Uniqlo. And the good news is that Uniqlo is super affordable.
If you need some UNIQLO moments, here are the best luxury athleisure pieces:
I’ll watch anything with Zendaya in it. Even without the genius-level marketing that was the Challengers press tour — complete with those tennis ball Loewe heels — I still would’ve rushed to the theater to watch Challengers. Due to last year’s strike, its delayed release made one thing obvious: anticipation really does make the reward that much sweeter. Challengers finally comes out on Friday, April 26th and after watching an early screening, I can confirm, it’s well worth the wait.
What is Challengers about?
Challengers is about tennis. Challengers is about a love triangle. Challengers is about Zendaya’s bob. Directed by Luca Guadagnino of Call Me By Your Name, it’s no surprise that this movie is also about sex. It follows three young tennis players — two lifelong friends who are rising stars and superstar prodigy Tashi Duncan with whom they are massively enamored — over their messy love lives and careers.
Zendaya leads as Tashi Duncan, the intense and intensely ambitious woman at the center of this story. After a devastating injury, Tashi goes from the top of the game to her husband’s coach, trying to recall what she felt at the height of her career.
Ambition battles desire as the love story between the three twists and turns over the course of time. Shifting between time periods and storylines, it feels like a Christopher Nolan film if it slayed. And with Luca’s expert directorial eye, styling from JW Anderson’s Loewe, and Zendaya as heroine, it’s a cinematic feat — tense, vivid, and utterly irresistible. Zendaya herself recommends watching the movie at least three times while “viewing” it from each character’s perspective each time. Well, what Z says, goes.
Clearly, Mike Faist (Dear Evan Hansen, West Side Story) as Art and Josh O’Connor (The Crown, God’s Own Country) as Patrick have been inducted into the exclusive club of Luca’s muses. If you weren’t in love with them before, you will be by the movie’s end. The film has confirmed them as the white boys of the month. But they’re more than just pretty faces. They are Actors — with a capital A.
And Challengers is their launch pad for Hollywood’s latest leading men. Their performances are masterful, their characters are tight and consistent, and their chemistry is unmatched.
While their chemistry with Zendaya is electric, it’s their chemistry together that keeps the film pulsing with anticipatory tension. Whether they love each other or hate each other, the best scenes are those when Faist and O’Connor can play off each other — whether it’s literally tennis or a battle of wits and the battle for Zendaya’s heart.
Of course: we have to talk about that scene. Teased in the trailer and the promo images alike, everyone is all aflutter over the film’s alleged menage a trois. Appearing early on, it’s a taste of what the film does well: emphasizes sex appeal without denigrating any of its characters — especially Zendaya — as mere sexual objects.
Sex in this film is often implied. Yet, sensuality and the power exchange of desire are foregrounded. It’s about power. But it’s also a game. And, like tennis, Zendaya is a master. “You don’t know what tennis is,” she tells Art and Patrick. “It’s a relationship.” For the three of them, this certainly proves true. The central question here is: who will win?
This is a movie about tennis, actually.
The internet has noticed a strange trend: the women who’ve played Spiderman’s love interest in the major Spiderman franchises have all gone on to do movies about tennis. Kirsten Dunst did the underrated rom-com Wimbledon. Emma Stone portrayed Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes just three years after her term as Gwen Stacey. And now, Zendaya is playing her own version of a tennis star.
But this isn’t just a film about tennis players. It’s a movie deeply in love with the game of tennis itself. It plays with the form of the game by mirroring a tennis match — each act of the film feels like a set of a match. It moves through scenes and time periods like perfect volleys. The key scene that ties it all together is a tennis match. We watch the ball go back and forth as we are transported to and from the past, wondering which player will get the upper hand.
“What do you want?” The boys ask Tashi early in the film. “To watch some good fucking tennis,” she says.
In the end, the sentiment is repeated. In tennis, love means zero. And that’s the Challengers’ conceit. Sitting across from the umpire (who is — fun fact — played by her real-life assistant Darnell Appling) in the central tennis scene, her judgment is all. It’s like the final scene of Love and Basketball — they’re playing for her heart. And her heart is always with the game.
Challengers will make a tennis fan of you. While you don’t need to know the game in order to follow the plot, its artistic representation of the game — from the writing to the directorial shot list — will satisfy the superfans and intrigue the newbies.
Let’s get to the point (pun intended): Is Zendaya’s Tashi a triumph?
Earlier this year, Timothee Chalamet achieved the impressive feat of starring in two of the year’s highest-grossing films — Dune: Part Two and Wonka. I predict that by the time they stop this weekend’s Box Office count, Zendaya will achieve the same feat with Dune: Part Two and Challengers.
While she’s the heart of Dune: Part Two, she’s finally taking her rightful place as a leading lady with her turn as Tashi Duncan. After playing high schoolers for decades from Spider-Man to Euphoria, the role of Tashi is the perfect transition. We meet Tashi the summer after high school, before she heads to Stanford, and watch her grow into an adult in real-time. Zendaya and her character get similar arcs.
Zendaya deftly handles Tashi’s youthful confidence with her jaded older self while rocking that damn bob. It’s up to you to decide whether you love this character or despise her. There’s a viral interview in which an interviewer remarks that as much as he loves Zendaya, this character kind of made him hate her. Meanwhile, I — lover of maneaters and female manipulators — am pinning photos of Tashi to my vision board as we speak.
Audiences are split on their takes on Tashi but everyone agrees: Zendaya played her with the chill-inducing complexity she deserves. EGOT soon! This is Zendaya’s magnum opus — so far. She’s proven she’s a movie star, a leading lady, and an adult woman ready to play older roles. I can’t wait for what she does next.
Challengers will hit theaters on Friday, April 26th. Watch the full trailer here:
In what is now surely the “instant classic” movie poster for Challengers, there is an illustrated version of Tashi Duncan (Zendaya)—her hair cropped short—wearing sunglasses that reflect two tennis-playing men, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Arthur “Art” Donaldson (Mike Faist), in each lens. A faint hint of a devious smirk on her face, everything about the poster suggests that she’s not only the “puppetmaster” of these two white boys, but also someone who gets a perverse (and sexual) thrill out of watching them compete with each other…specifically over (tennis) courting her favor (and yes, Challengers is now easily among the best “tennis movies,” complete with a Venus Williams nod of approval [sorry King Richard]).
Director Luca Guadagnino, who perfected the art of homoerotic repression constantly about to bubble to the surface in 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, does so to an even more sophisticated and nuanced degree here. With a script penned by playwright Justin Kuritzkes (who also happens to be married to Past Lives writer-director Celine Song), the barbing nature of the dialogue is mirrored not only by the high-octane back and forth on the tennis court, but also the high-octane soundtrack—provided by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—to match. Even during moments when audiences wouldn’t typically expect…namely, during tense scenes of dialogue where the sparring is done with words instead of rackets. And oh, how there are so many tense scenes that make it irresistible for Guadagnino to use the Reznor/Ross-produced music (which, at times, sounds like it was made by New Order). Not that there aren’t plenty of other moments when “normal” music is used, too. Specifically to indicate what year of the 2000s it is. Even though, when Tashi first comes up to Patrick and Art’s hotel room, and it’s supposed to be 2006, Blood Orange’s “Uncle ACE” is playing in the background—a song that didn’t come out until 2013. But “whatever,” one supposes…guess it’s all about the “mood” and not “historical accuracy” (just ask the music supervisors on Saltburnand Madame Web). Earlier in their pursuit, when Patrick and Art home in on Tashi at a party thrown in her honor on Long Island, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is playing like it’s 2002.
When we get to 2007, other 00s-era bops include Blu Cantrell’s 2001 single, “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!)” and Lily Allen’s 2006 smash, “Smile” (which plays faintly in the background of the cafeteria at Stanford while Tashi and Art have lunch together). It seems Guadagnino isn’t as interested in matching the music to the year when we enter 2010 and beyond, with the film commencing in August of 2019 before it flashes back to thirteen years earlier and then keeps flip-flopping in between certain years prior. From the beginning, though, it’s made clear that the real relationship—the core one—is between Patrick and Art. In 2006, they play together as “Fire and Ice” (though it’s never said which one is fire and which ice—hair color-wise, Art would be fire and Patrick ice, but personality-wise, each man can be both…“bi,” if you will).
Their feelings of love beyond friendship are immediately conveyed in the way they embrace one another on the court after winning a game of doubles. Later on, as they walk through the tournament eating hot dogs (a very specific food choice) together, they geek out about their passion for tennis before settling into the audience stand to watch a match. It is at this point that Patrick starts to talk up Tashi, calling her the “hottest woman I’ve ever seen” (cue Katy Perry singing, “California gurls/We’re undeniable/Fine, fresh, fierce/We got it on lock”). Art has no idea what he’s talking about until Tashi steps onto the court at that very moment and proceeds to do some sensual stretches before making the game her bitch.
Art is now convinced about going to the party on Long Island to try to talk to her. And they do. They wait all night, until everyone else is leaving, to really talk to her. During their first proper conversation together, Tashi tells Patrick and Art that every tennis match is like being in a relationship with someone. And the audience gets to watch it all unfold. She seems to direct this metaphor more toward Patrick, who she thinks hasn’t yet learned what tennis really is yet, despite being a better player than Art. Indeed, Patrick had agreed to let Art win the match the following day until Tashi shows up in their hotel room and plants the seed of competition in their mind by saying that she’ll only give her number to the boy who wins the match the next day. So it is that a shift in Patrick and Art’s dynamic occurs. Where once they were on an even playing field with little source of conflict, Tashi is the wrench thrown into their formerly repressed homoeroticism. But she brings it out in them when, during a “three-way” kiss, it doesn’t take long for it to become a two-way between Patrick and Art, who have to be reminded that Tashi is even still there when she demands, “Stop.” She then chooses to go no further because, as she puts it, “I’m not a homewrecker.” A “half-joke” with more truth in it than not. For Patrick and Art are in love, and Tashi is essentially breaking up the purity of that love with her introduction as a presence to compete for. The Patrick/Art rapport is, needless to say, one that mirrors the Jules/Jim one as described by the narration, “Jules and Jim’s friendship had no equivalent in love. They delighted together in the smallest things. They accepted their differences with tenderness. From the start, everyone called them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.”
As the audience watches the drama of Challengers unfurl over these ten-plus years (intercutting back and forth like a tennis ball in the timeline), it always seemed Art wanted Tashi because Patrick did, and because “winning” her would somehow prove he had “superior game.” What’s more, in its psychologically fraught way, being with Tashi is a means to become even closer to him…to figuratively “cross swords” (instead of just rackets) by having entered the same woman. Tashi’s eventual leaning toward Art, despite being with Patrick (who won the match that day in ‘06 in order to gain her number) first, is a direct result of what Patrick said to her when they eventually broke up: she wanted someone to boss around, to be her “fan,” not her peer. In short, she wanted a whipping boy. But she also wanted someone like Patrick, too. Someone who pushes back and is unpredictable—fiery. Essentially, she does need and want both of them because she can’t get their respective personalities in just one man. And while she might seem like the alpha throughout the sizzling narrative, her formation at the top of the triangle betrays the reality that, without her, Patrick and Art would still go on as friends-bordering-on-lovers anyway. Were it not for her, as a matter of fact, they would have remained friends instead of “breaking up.”
It is in this regard that Challengers might present a dangerous underlying message (though not one that is anything new in our misogynistic society). And that is: whenever a woman gets involved, it ruins everything “precious” and “beautiful” about a male friendship. Invokes jealousies and pettiness that never would have arisen had it not been for “that bitch” (see also: Dawson’s Creek). There are numerous love triangle movies to this effect, not least of which is Jules and Jim. In fact, Tashi has nothing on Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), the woman whose affections Jules and Jim vie for until Jules ends up marrying and having a child with her. Which is exactly what Art does with Tashi. Except that, rather than shunning Jim from their lives, they welcome him into it. Moreover (Moreau-ver?), it’s obvious Catherine still has a thing for him, too. And Jules even wants Jim to be with her, suggesting as much when he notices how bored and lifeless she’s become.
Patrick is the Jim of the permutation in Challengers—the ballsier, less mild-mannered of the male duo that Tashi can’t help continuing to be attracted to. Even if she’s endlessly bored by each of them individually, but excited by them when they, er, come together. In turn, Patrick and Art are excited by Tashi because she is the conduit that sparks the sexual charge between them (this most overtly manifested during the hotel kissing scene when she only briefly divides them before they end up kissing each other).
The reason Patrick and Art are attracted to Tashi is also for the same reason Jules and Jim are attracted to Catherine: she is a “disruptor” to their calm, static “friendship.” Someone who will shake things up, make life interesting and, yes, challenge them. Sometimes to be better, but, more often than not, to be the worst versions of themselves. Which, again, doesn’t exactly serve as a great PSA for women. Forever painted as “manipulative” and “calculated.” But at least in Challengers, Tashi doesn’t end up killing Patrick—so that’s progress on the toxicity front. Regardless of whether or not one sees Challengers as a monogamy or polyamory story, a gay or a straight one.
I haven’t seen a movie that edges its audience with more cruel glee than Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s latest horny-in-theory story of complicated romance.
Anyone expecting a moist-and-sweaty Jules et Jim set in the competitive world of professional tennis, which is what I thought when I kept seeing the trailer, will be slightly disappointed (and even a bit impressed) by how much this movie teases you. Whether it’s in the bedroom or on the court, the Call Me by Your Name director goes to extreme lengths to make sure the characters — and the audience — don’t reach a climax until the time is just right.
The entire film takes place on a buzzing tennis court as waning tennis champion Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and struggling has-been Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), two pals-turned-rivals, play an intense game. Also there is Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a one-time tennis prodigy who was once Zweig’s main squeeze and is now Donaldson’s devoted wife-coach.
As Zweig and Donaldson battle it out on the court, Guadagnino tells how this twisted love triangle came to be through good ol’ non-linear storytelling. Flashbacks literally pile on top of flashbacks as we visit these three in their younger years, back when the boys were shaggy-haired BFFs who immediately became smitten with Duncan and her beautiful ferocity. We also slide into their more adult years, when Donaldson has to keep the winning going for both himself and his wife, who gets sidelined by a career-crushing injury and still can’t seem to get over her bummy-ass ex whenever they’re in the same vicinity.
Right from the opening seconds, Guadagnino creates an athletic melodrama that crackles with lustful intensity. He even gets Oscar-winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to supply a throbbing techno score that surfaces whenever these characters get hot and bothered — physically, mentally, emotionally — on screen.
Guadagnino is ever the stealthy queer filmmaker; anyone hoping for Zendaya to get butt-bald-nekkid will also be disappointed by the bare, loose male genitals that are often on display. With screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who’s also written Guadagnino’s upcoming film, aptly titled Queer), Guadagnino subtly drops hints that these buds are more into each other than the gal in the middle. The scene where they have an in-your-face convo while eating phallic-looking churros is a dead giveaway. Faist credibly pulls off the feat of going from young, callow third wheel to middle-aged, frustrated third wheel, while O’Connor, that Jeremy Sisto-looking Brit, plays the asshole role with oily unrepentance.
As for the star of the show, I’ve never seen a young actress so eager to play a grown-ass, take-charge woman like Zendaya, who also serves as a producer. Just as she recently showed in the mega-blockbuster Dune sequel, Zendaya always acts like she dares people to dismiss her as demure and waifish. From the get-go, Queen Euphoria is in charge of this wild ride, and those two poor, dumb bastards have no choice but to follow her lead. Even when her character ropes the two into a late-night makeout session that ends on a very homoerotic note, Zendaya quietly makes it official that it’s her world and we’re all just doing gay shit in it.
Zendaya also has no problem playing someone whose thirst for competition supersedes her need to make rational decisions. Her character faces that dilemma that many women have dealt with: Should she stick with a stable yet unfulfilling life with her reliable simp husband, or risk all that shit for the unworthy, irresponsible douchebag who can bring the ruckus sexually (and personally)?
I wish I was as enthused about Challengers as my fellow film-critic colleagues. Apparently, the issue of whether or not sex is essential in movies has become such a tiresome debate, some people are ready to cheer a film that at least presents the idea that its main characters want to jump each other’s bones.
But as wild and insane as Guadagnino makes the tennis sequences between O’Connor and Faist (we even catch the match from the tennis ball’s perspective!), Challengers, like most heated, emotional, one-on-one interactions, comes to a messy, baffling finish. Not to mention that the absurdly-heightened finale declares what this movie truly is: the most bros-before-hoes movie Guadagnino has ever made.
(L-R) Mike Faist as Art, Zendaya as Tashi and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in Challengers. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
Loud, long, a little messy and very sweaty, Challengers may not be as sexy as its explosive first trailer implied, but it’s still a hell of a movie. Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor make for quite the toxic tennis love triangle at the center of it all, each co-star crackling with chemistry and some deeply realized character work.
The film follows three people who have tied themselves to tennis, for better or worse. Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) was a junior champion poised to be the sport’s next big thing before a horrific injury forced her into coaching; she’s now married to Art Donaldson (Faist), a player who’s great but far from being one of the greats, despite Tashi’s coaching. They met over a decade prior, when Art was besties with the slightly less respectable Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). Challengers makes frequent use of flashbacks to tie this complicated threesome together, as Art and Patrick go from friends to enemies, Tashi and Patrick from lovers to nuisances, Art and Tashi from tennis pals to husband and wife.
Much of the movie’s action takes place over a two-week competition (amusingly called Phil’s Tire Town Challenger, situated on some quaint New Rochelle courts). It’s where Art, Patrick and, inevitably, Tashi meet again after years apart, all nearing the end of their careers but at different stages of acceptance over it. When Art and Patrick face off against each other in the final round, it triggers a great deal of memories that fuel the fire of what could very well be their last match.
Mike Faist and Zendaya in Challengers. Niko Tavernise
That kind of non-linear storytelling gets jarring at times, and the erratic volleying between timelines is one of the film’s major faults. The hair and makeup team do wonders to distinguish these characters over the years, and the actors perform the wear and tear of aging more than well enough to keep things clear. It’s not that it’s confusing, given how each flashback feeds into the current match and vice versa, but it makes for a choppy viewing experience. And it’s not helped by an overzealous use of chyrons, with everything timestamped in a 13-year period with enough specificity that you need to do the math in your seat.
Challengers has this same overbearing streak in other areas too. Director Luca Guadagnino, still chasing the career high of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, goes maximalist on this movie, using bizarre camera angles, relentless slo-mo, and a few questionable needle drops. It’s occasionally overpowering, and sometimes the sound mix even makes it hard to hear the excellent, incisive dialogue. Also, the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack may have used too much synth, a feat this critic thought all but impossible.
There’s a lot to nitpick here, but it’s only because so much of the movie works so well otherwise. The central drama is juicy beyond words, and the way the relationships unravel is delicious. As Tashi Donaldson-nee-Duncan, Zendaya gets to flex a very different acting muscle than what audiences have seen. She’s a tennis-obsessed sociopath (in the way that elite athletes must be, at least a little), determined to stay in the game whatever way she can. She needs to win, but, at the same time, she doesn’t have the most traditional definition of winning. In the flashback scenes to Tashi’s first meeting with the boys, she riles them up not just for her enjoyment, but for the love of the game.
Though the film earns its R rating, it’s not through sex—the three stars are never fully nude, never go further than a steamy makeout or some dry humping. But that doesn’t stop Challengers from being exceptionally sensual, and Tashi’s voyeuristic view of Art and Patrick (and their tennis) adds to that. The boys aren’t on her level as athletes or as psychosexual tennis lovers, and watching Zendaya pull their strings with that sly grin of hers is an absolute delight. She also gets some of the movie’s best lines, delivered with an iciness that’ll knock the wind right out of you.
Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in Challengers. Niko Tavernise
Faist and O’Connor deliver some fantastic dueling performances too. Faist, best known for his scene-stealing turn in the recent West Side Story redux, sheds any vestige of a theater kid background to play Art. In the flashbacks, he’s sentimental and soft, polite but with a penchant for passive aggression. In the now, he’s a tennis machine verging on a mid-life crisis that’s only exacerbated by seeing his old friend—his inevitable emotional implosion comes with a rocket serve that’ll make you jump in your seat. As for O’Connor, Patrick somehow manages to be greasier than the actor’s wayward wanderer in La Chimera and infinitely more smarmy. Patrick’s cool guy schtick is out of gas somewhere in the middle of the movie’s timeline, and though he’s self aware about it, Patrick is still a man who thinks he can charm and connive his way out of anything. He’s not likable, but he’s certainly magnetic, with the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth saying more than he ever will.
The boys go from bunkmates to rivals to bitter foes on and off the court, and as they come to blows over the final round, Challengers serves up greatness. It takes a bit long to get there in the end, and some cinematic tricks may distract you, but when Patrick goes to serve that fateful final ball and Art runs to meet it, all with Tashi watching and waiting to feel that kind of power again, it’s game, set, match.
The writer Justin Kuritzkes became obsessed with pro tennis after watching Naomi Osaka beat Serena Williams at the 2018 U.S. Open in an infamous match fraught with argument. As Williams pleaded her case to the umpire, Kuritzkes realized how cinematic the situation could be: how alone each player was, yet how linked to each other. He started watching tennis all the time, and when he ran out of big matches, he found smaller ones like the Challenger tournaments — low-budget events that could help someone qualify for the highest level of competition. Some of the players there may be among the top 300 in the world, but they’re fighting for prize money that won’t even cover their expenses. Kuritzkes knew the feeling. At the time, he was a well-regarded playwright who struggled to get anything produced. “Although the stands at a Challenger are mostly empty, the players’ emotions are just as if they were at the U.S. Open because they’re fighting for their lives. It’s the humiliation of being a gladiator and nobody’s even there to watch you die,” he says. “I connected with that deeply as a theater person. If you asked me if I know the 271st most successful theater actor in America, I probably do. And I guarantee you they’re broke.”
In 2021, he decided to channel his tennis fixation into a screenplay — and now that screenplay is Challengers, a Zendaya-led production full of enough unsatisfied desire and close-ups of sweaty, beautiful young men to confirm that Luca Guadagnino directed it. The film follows three tennis players who have spent their entire adult lives entangled in one another’s careers and beds: Zendaya plays Tashi Donaldson, a former prodigy who should have gone pro but couldn’t. Mike Faist is her husband, Art, a six-time Grand Slam winner whom Tashi both coaches and disdains. And then there’s Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), an all-id ex-friend and doubles partner to Art and ex-boyfriend to Tashi. When Patrick reencounters the couple at a Challenger in suburban New York, it throws all three of them into racket-smashing, early-onset midlife crisis.
Challengers is Zendaya’s first big-screen leading role, and she plays Tashi full of withholding and coiled, frustrated ambition; her idea of a pep talk before a match is telling her husband to “decimate that little bitch.” This is also Kuritzkes’s first screenplay. Now 33, he spent his 20s writing comic and disturbing plays that were supported by prestigious residencies and fellowships but rarely produced for the stage. Hollywood has been a lot faster to welcome him: After Challengers, he’s got another film with Guadagnino, an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs book Queer. Next, he’s adapting Don Winslow’s mob novel City on Fire with Austin Butler set to star. This would all seem more unprecedented if his wife hadn’t just done something similar: Kuritzkes is married to Celine Song, the former playwright whose own debut film, Past Lives, was nominated for two Oscars.
Even if most of the people who saw Past Lives didn’t know Kuritzkes’s name, Song’s press tour gave him a kind of secondhand, not-quite-accurate fame: The film is about a New York playwright who reengages with a childhood crush from South Korea and begins to question her marriage to her white husband. In interviews, Song talked at length about how her film was inspired by her own life. Now Kuritzkes has written a ménage à trois of his own. Like Past Lives, it hinges on a young woman who is forced to confront the romantic road not taken. Unlike Song, he’s not willing to discuss that theme. “Challengers is an intensely personal film to me — in ways that I’m not interested in talking about,” he says.
He dismisses the films’ similarities. “Love triangles are one of the most basic plots in cinema,” he says. “Even in a relationship between two people, there’s always a sort of imagined third presence.” I ask what that third presence might be. “Well, for a lot of people, it’s, like, Jesus,” he jokes. “Or it’s their conception of themselves, or their parents, or their friends. But in a love triangle, that third presence is not imagined.” Either way, he says, the parallels between his life and Past Lives or Challengers don’t matter: “Once it gets transformed into a work of art, the connection between that and the real thing is irrelevant. That’s just fuel that you’re using to propel a vehicle.”
Justin Kuritzkes on the set of Challengers. Photo: Niko Tavernise/Niko Tavernise
Kuritzkes and I meet at the Fort Greene Park tennis courts in early April, settling down on a cold bench to watch the amateurs hit. To the left, four middle-aged white men play competent doubles. To the right, two young people struggle just to get the ball over the net. Suddenly, a horde of 14-year-olds stream onto the courts, running and yelling as they gather for what’s either an after-school tennis camp or an ad hoc hazing. When Kuritzkes was around that age, he had already quit his tennis lessons. “I could tell exactly how bad I was. I would have moments where it clicked and then wouldn’t be able to replicate it. That drove me crazy because I was like, Well, why can’t I just do that every time?” he says. “I decided I was as good as I was ever going to get and it wasn’t good enough. So I was done.”
Kuritzkes grew up in L.A., the son of a real-estate-lawyer mother and gastroenterologist father, and went to the prep school Harvard-Westlake, where he graduated one year behind Lily Collins and three years ahead of Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein. The school had a student playwriting festival, and Kuritzkes became a regular participant, writing 10-to-15-minute plays. “The immediacy of theater was intoxicating,” he says. “You can just write something, get two chairs, and have actors do it and the audience will suspend their disbelief.” When he went off to Brown, “I already knew I was a playwright,” he says. In between working on his thesis, he started making character-study videos on his laptop, warping his face using the built-in effects of Photo Booth. In his most-watched video, “Potion Seller,” he plays a knight who keeps begging a merchant for potions.
He met Song the summer after he graduated, in 2012, during a fellowship in Montauk. Song fictionalized this first encounter in Past Lives in a woozy scene where protagonist Nora (Greta Lee) flirts with future husband Arthur (John Magaro) under the fairy lights at a dreamlike residency. Nora departs on a long definition of the Korean concept of in-yun — “It means providence, or fate” — before circling back to say it’s just “something Koreans say to seduce someone.”
Song has said they connected over their work, so I ask Kuritzkes, half-joking, how long it took before he showed her his YouTube videos. He stiffens. “I’m so thrilled and happy to talk about Celine in virtually every context, but I would never want to speak for her in the context of an interview,” he says. Too much in-yun has been spilled already. I point out that Song has spoken freely about their lives together. “I wouldn’t want anybody to confuse the character and me because it erases the work that she and her actor did, or it pollutes it,” he says. I ask if he thinks people do confuse him with the character. “I don’t know,” he replies, looking me straight in the eye. “Do you?”
In Past Lives, the husband is a gentle presence who recedes into the background. In real life, Kuritzkes comes off as preternaturally self-assured. “He has had that from a very young age,” says theater director Danya Taymor. “It’s not arrogance. He just believes in himself.” Shortly after Kuritzkes and Song started dating, “Potion Seller” went so viral that The New Yorker eventually published a parody of it; the video now has over 11 million views. The couple married in 2016, the same year Kuritzkes’s play The Sensuality Party — his thesis from Brown, a series of interlocking monologues from college kids who have an orgy that turns nonconsensual — was produced Off Broadway with Taymor directing. When Kuritzkes and another friend, the director Knud Adams, wanted to stage Kuritzkes’s play Asshole, they built the set themselves and rehearsed in their respective apartments. The play is about a doctor who oversees the force-feeding of prisoners at a government black site and is obsessed with his own asshole. Kuritzkes had written it in 2014 after reading about the force-feeding of Guantánamo prisoners on hunger strike. “The fact that everybody could go about our normal lives after hearing about it really freaked me out,” he says. “I started to think, Well, what would really repulse somebody? It would be a guy playing with his own asshole and smelling his own shit.” The production, at the Brooklyn theater Jack, was a surprise hit. As Adams remembers, “We sold out all our shows. But then it’s not hard to sell out Jack — there are 40 seats.”
Writing Challengers was an exercise in following desire. Deep in the grips of tennis mania, Kuritzkes had begun to wonder what could make watching the game even more interesting. “If I knew exactly what was at stake on an emotional level beyond the court for the people playing and the people watching, that would be just eating a plate of chocolate truffles to me.” His agent sent the script to the producers, Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor, who got it to Zendaya, who loved it. The actress wanted both to star and to co-produce. “One of the things I remember saying to Zendaya when we first met was that the cultural space that Zendaya occupies in the world is the space that the character Tashi was supposed to occupy — that was the life she was supposed to have,” says Kuritzkes. “I think she really connected with that ambition and that pain.” The producers and Zendaya who got Guadagnino onboard.
With Challengers, Kuritzkes became part of a machine: He was working with Guadagnino and the film’s tennis consultant, the coach and commentator Brad Gilbert, on the many gameplay scenes, which were choreographed like fights. Each one had to be shot with both body doubles and the actors, and only Faist came in with tennis experience. “During breaks, we would sometimes pick up racquets and play. I have really funny videos on my phone of Luca,” says Kuritzkes, smiling. “It was so adorable. He just couldn’t hit the ball to save his life.”
Kuritzkes says that he always imagined a charge between Art and Patrick — “There is eroticism present in every intimate friendship, especially one between two guys who have spent their lives in locker rooms and dorm rooms and on the court together” — and that Guadagnino’s interpretation pushed it further. Mostly, though, the boys are each other’s foils, with Patrick always willing to play the heel. In Guadagnino’s hands, this inevitably bends erotic. When the two first become infatuated with Tashi, Art says earnestly that she’s “a remarkable young woman.” Patrick replies, “I know. She’s a pillar of the community.” He lowers to a whisper: “I’d let her fuck me with a racquet.” Kuritzkes says that although none of the characters is based on a real player, it was important for Tashi to be a Black woman. “The story of American tennis is Black women for the past however many decades,” he says. “I also knew that I didn’t want to not specify the races of the characters. That always feels to me like you’re avoiding something. Her being a Black woman informs a lot about how she navigates her situation and how she navigates her relationship with these guys.” The Zendaya line making the rounds in the film’s trailer — “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys” — sounds affectionate only on paper.
When Kuritzkes was a kid, he felt bad that so many of the films he loved, like Jules et Jim and Y Tu Mamá También, were about love triangles; he felt guilty getting so much pleasure from watching a scenario in which someone was being wronged, rejected, or hurt. Now he believes movies are exactly the right place for it. “Part of the joy of watching it is thinking, At least my life isn’t as messed up as that, or, My life is as messed up as that, and thank God I’m not alone,” he says. “What’s good for art is the opposite of what’s good for life.”
ZendayaBackgrid 
Zendaya Backgrid
