‘Rivals’ screenwriter, starring Zendaya, says ‘tennis is almost homoerotic’

Justin Kuritzkes started writing the script for Rivals before even knowing if your project would get off the ground. It was only in 2021, when his work appeared on the Black List — an annual compilation that shows the most popular Hollywood scripts that have not yet been executed — that production companies Amy Pascal It is Rachel O’Connor took the reins. They soon called Zendaya to embark on the venture and, later, Luca Guadagnino was in charge of management.

With that, a love triangle has filled movie theaters around the world — once again. Kuritzkes is the husband of Celine Songdirector and screenwriter of Past lives (2023). The feature film follows the reunion of two childhood friends and a journey about identity.

Check out the synopsis of Rivals:

Rivals is from the same director as the hit Call Me By Your Name (2017), winner of the Oscar It is BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay, in 2018. A highly talented tennis player as a teenager, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) had a promising future ahead of him. At the same time, she had a romantic relationship with two friends and also players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist). However, a serious injury caused her to partially leave the court. Time passed, she became Art’s wife and trainer, and made him a champion. But the flames of the three-way relationship, it seems, may not have been put out definitively, and Art’s main opponent now is Patrick (via Kinoplex).

+++READ MORE: Rivals, starring Zendaya, is it inspired by real events?

In an interview with Variety, Kuritzkes talked about Patrick and Art’s relationship. “When it comes to Patrick and Art, they spent their entire lives together, they grew up together, they went through puberty together. They saw each other becoming men,” he said.

For the screenwriter, tennis “is a very erotic sport” and “kind of the opposite of boxing, in which you are alone and all the time touching someone else.”

There’s a deep intimacy and a deep eroticism to it, and also a lot of repression. It’s a very repressed sport because, again, the point is to have no contact. The point is to just get close to the other person. To me, this is almost like a Victorian novel. It’s very sexy. So tennis, by its nature, is erotic, and generally you play tennis against someone of the same gender. Therefore, tennis, by its nature, becomes almost homoerotic.

Everything changes when Tashi appears and causes “desire” to flow “in all directions in ways that are confusing to everyone”: “Trying to define it or trying to classify it and say it’s one thing or another runs the risk of simplifying it. , because the nature of their environment is that everyone is discovering new things within themselves because of the arrangement in which they find themselves with each other.”