Prom Dates Cast Talk Friendship and Positive Queer Representation

You never forget prom…

It’s the night Jess and Hannah have dreamed of their whole lives. But when they lose their prom dates, they have 24 hours to fix things to secure the perfect prom night. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke to the cast and creative behind the new Hulu film Prom Dates.

Led by Antonia Gentry and Julia Lester, the creative team loved the layers the actresses brought to their roles as best friends. “We were already really big fans of Julia and Antonia’s. Their work is so great and we just really loved that they could be all the things to themselves and to each other, which we really felt like would resonate with the audience,” director Kim O. Nguyen told me. “They're both hilarious, but they can go so deep too. Just being able to excavate these characters with them was such a great experience.”

While it seems like Jess and Hannah are focused on dates, the true heart of the film is their friendship. “It was the very first feature I had ever written so I wanted to write what I knew about. I am very lucky to have some wonderful long-standing friendships in my life,” screenwriter D.J. Mausner said. “I thought what's easier to write about than the love for my friends that I experienced so constantly? My two childhood best friends that I met in the fifth grade, I'm still friends with to this day, and they are in town right now to celebrate the premiere.”

Nguyen continued: “The core of it is just how important your friends are. No matter where you are in life or or whatever you're doing, friends can often be your chosen family. Your friendships can be more impactful sometimes and even more devastating actually than romantic relationships.”

While Lester and Gentry met right before filming, their connection was instantaneous. “It's such an abrupt friendship that you have to create when you're partners with somebody on screen and you have to portray this lifelong love and friendship for each other. Antonia and I met like three days before we had to start filming and we hit it off right away,” said Lester. “There was such such an ease about the language that we spoke and just who we were as people. I love that it's so obvious on screen because we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we got this. We can play best friends easy.’ We had such an amazing time behind the scenes. She is just so wonderful. I adore her so it was a really special experience with her.”

The film also explores Hannah’s coming out story in a positive way, which was very important to Mauser. “I'm queer and trans and came out as those things at different times in my life. I've been very lucky to have a lot of support in my life. I didn't want to depict something that hadn't been true for me,” they said. “There are certainly many people who have that terrible experience coming out, don't get me wrong, but because that wasn't my experience it felt wrong to dramatize that. Instead, it was really fun for me to let a queer character have fun.”

“I feel like there's constant jokes and conversation about like every lesbian movie being a period piece where two women touch fingers for 5 seconds and then never see each other again,” Mauser continued. “It was important to me that Julia's character had a good time over the course of the movie and have those very important experiences, those milestones that you have through coming out in a condensed format in this movie. You know, kissing a girl for the first time, asking a girl out. Those kinds of things that are very much real parts of queer and more specifically lesbian culture.” 

Lester agreed wholeheartedly. “It's a really authentic, natural, very chill queer storyline for this character who is newly discovering herself. Something that I also love about it is that every single person around her is loving and supportive. We need to see more of that,” she said. That's the world that I was fortunate to grow up in and the world that I want to see around me. So I love that we get to tell these stories in such a positive light that make people feel good.”

While Hannah finds the guts to ask her crush to prom, it doesn’t play out as a typical romance. “Being at prom itself was cool and seeing how that got to play out. Instead of it being necessarily like, ‘We're going to date forever now,’ I thought it was cool that it was like, ‘No, look, let me just be your friend,’” explained Terry Hu, who played Hannah’s crush. “That felt actually very heartwarming to me.”

Prom Dates is streaming on Hulu.