Challengers: This years sexiest film doesn’t have any sex
The game is just a metaphor, says Zendaya, the star and producer of Luca Guadagnino’s smoking hot love-triangle drama set in the world of tennis.
Challengers, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, is being hailed as the sexiest film of the year, but its star and producer, Zendaya, wants one thing to be crystal clear: There isn’t any sex.
The film, currently in Australian cinemas, is a smoking hot love-triangle drama set in the world of tennis. It stars The Crown’s Josh O’Connor as Patrick Zweig and West Side Story’s Mike Faist as Art Donaldson, best friends since they were 12-year-old bunkmates at boarding school turned tennis pros battling it out for the affection of Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan.
In Challengers, tennis is suffused with lust. What would usually happen between the sheets is saved for the court. “The tennis is a metaphor,” Zendaya, 27, explains, sitting alongside her co-stars in a sterile hotel room at the Park Hyatt in Sydney, hours before the film’s global premiere. “You have the same kind of adrenaline rush. But there isn’t any …”,” she stops just shy of saying “sex scenes.”
No filmmaker captures unspoken, crushing desire like Guadagnino, the Italian director whose mainstream breakout, 2017’s sumptuous Call Me By Your Name, which centred on a clandestine love affair between a young scholar and a seventeen-year-old music prodigy, made sure that none of us would ever see peaches in an innocuous light again.
In Challengers, adapted from a script by first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes — who is married to Celine Song, director of last year’s love triangle hit, Past Lives — Guadagnino brings his sensual appetite to tennis, a sport he has admitted to finding “quite boring.”
Challengers is told through flashbacks and structured around a present-tense match between Art and Patrick, 13 years after they met Tashi. In the now, Art is a tennis champion on a losing streak, clearly with little love left for the game and ready to pack it in. However, he has a sinking feeling that it’s the only thing keeping his increasingly loveless marriage with Tashi together. Tashi, the fiery and cryptic former teen prodigy who becomes Art’s coach after a devastating knee injury, has come up with a plan to get him his mojo back: he will compete against inferior players as a wildcard in the ATP Challenger Tour in the boonies of New York State.
Enter Patrick, who oozes the kind of scuzzy dropkick swagger that makes you think, “I can fix him.” For reasons left unsaid, Patrick’s once-promising career is in the gutter, his bank balance is in the negative, and he is sleeping in his car, competing purely for money. But he still has his God-given talent and, crucially, a burning love for Tashi. It’s inevitable then that he and Art will end up competing against each other in the final, with Tashi watching on from the sidelines.
In this Challengers game lie the film’s most charged moments. The triumvirate of Zendaya, O’Connor, and Faist communicate 13 years of emotion through come-and-get-it stares, sweat, throbbing muscles, and the subtlest changes in expression. “I think that’s what Luca does really beautifully,” says Zendaya. “The tennis is so intense the whole time, but he’s able to track the emotions and never lose sight of where these characters are individually. You feel very intimately connected to all of them.”
O’Connor, sitting beside Zendaya in a cozy terracotta sweatshirt, chimes in: “That’s what’s so clever about this movie. You feel like you’ve watched them …” he gesticulates vaguely as if to imply, have sex. “But the sex scenes are the tennis scenes. It’s the point of deepest connection between the three of them.”
There is an almost-sex scene the night the three first meet as junior players at the US Open and nearly have a painfully clumsy threesome in a mangy Long Island hotel room — the same scene teased in the film’s trailer, as soundtracked by Rihanna’s fabulously raunchy hit ‘S & M’ — but it’s not as tantalising as led on, and the deal is never sealed.
It is Guadagnino’s cinematic style, which searches for sensual pleasure in everything, that makes the sexual tension clear: ravenous close-ups of arms readying a serve; booming, carnal grunts of athletic exertion; and camerawork that ping-pongs between the three like they’re perpetual opponents.
Then there’s the score, by Oscar-winner Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — whom Guadagnino briefed via email, describing the film as “very sexxxxxxy” — which is built as a continuous mix and plays like a night out at an overstuffed, sweaty club. It’s by far the most libidinal music the Nine Inch Nails masterminds have made to date, and they once wrote the lyric “I want to f – you like an animal.”
Preparing for the film was physically draining, says Zendaya, who trained with the famed coach Brad Gilbert. “We had a good month of struggling it out together,” she says, joshing her co-stars. “There was a sense of camaraderie. It was intense and we really wanted to do well, but there were also moments where we got to be kids a little bit.”
When it came to acting out the scenes, which were meticulously storyboarded, she didn’t always confidently know what it was they were shooting. “It’s two weeks of the same thing over and over, and you’re like, damn, what are you shooting, there are so many glances and beats and moments. It’s hard to track what you’re doing,” she says.
“You are in your own little play, it’s quite isolating,” says Faist.
When asked if it made sense to them, watching the film back, Faist is quick to admit: “I always hate watching my films.”
“I saw a screening of West Side Story for the first time, and for me, artistically, the making of that movie was everything that I had hoped to accomplish as an actor and that was the most liberated I had ever felt. Then when I watched the film, I was like ‘If that’s what liberation looks like, I need to get a different job.”
“It’s a really strange thing when you make a film you have this experience and it’s very rare that the experience you have is what goes on screen,” O’Connor adds, thoughtfully. “That’s partly because the shortest time you’re spending when you’re filming is on action. It’s all the other stuff — the hanging out and watching Ratatouille or whatever it is — it’s those moments that are the things you remember. It’s very hard to put on screen.”
Faist, 32, is perhaps best known for his Tony-nominated performance in the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen, and speaks softly, with a refreshing candour for an actor starring in a massive studio film. He says that he came into Challengers “deeply insecure and terrified of doing it.”
“I came from off-Broadway theatre, and we didn’t get paid. So it’s like, ‘what do you mean you’re going to pay me actual money to do this,’” he says. “To be here, and to walk into rooms with great actors for a big studio feature with a big-time director, is really [a matter of] battling those insecurities and choosing to say ‘No, it’s okay, I do deserve to be here, let me get to work.”
Faist once said in an interview that he wanted to tackle roles that forced him to find pieces of himself that he didn’t know existed. For him, Art was “expressing something that I’ve always ground up against on my own,” in the film, that’s tennis, but for him, it’s acting.
“It’s this constant falling in and out of love with what you do. We’re always trying to find a project or a role that we deeply connect with, and there’s chunks of time where it’s not really there and you start to wonder whether you really want to keep doing this,” he says. “Actors are always disrespected in a way. You really, really want to have to do this in order to get real joy and to get to a place where you can make it feasible for yourself.”
Challengers is in cinemas now.