The trailer for HBO‘s new teen drama Euphoria is purposefully ambiguous. We’re introduced to several high school characters, including Rue (Zendaya), who are seemingly using drugs as a form of escapism. And because of that, what you watch plays out like a neon fever dream. You’re never really sure if what you’re watching is reality or some kind of synthetic high. The only thing you can be certain of is that these teens’ problems will come crashing down the second sobriety hits.
The word crash in that last sentence is important, because nothing about Euphoria is soft. It’s unlike any adolescent soap opera you’ve ever seen: raw, real, and, at times, very hard to watch. Think Gossip Girl with the volume turned way up. In the pilot episode we learn more specifics about the show’s keys players: There’s Rue, a 17-year-old addict returning from rehab with no intentions of staying sober; Jules (Hunter Schafer), the new girl who shakes things up at the year’s first big house party; Nate (Jacob Elordi), a chiseled jock with anger issues; McKay (Algee Smith), another jock who isn’t as misogynistic as his friends; and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), whose nude selfies have become fodder for her gross male peers.
Each one of these characters is dealing with a major issue—be it anger, addiction, or sexuality—and they’re given the space to explore it. Fully. Nothing is diluted or sugar-coated, which is what drew several of Euphoria‘s actors to the project in the first place.
“I was blown away by how real it was, true it was, and how timely it was,” Smith tells Glamour. “My character goes on an emotional roller coaster. He’s trying to figure out himself and his masculinity, his vulnerability, how to be comfortable with that, and how to also deal with a lot of complexities going on in his life.”
Zendaya and Hunter Schafer in Euphoria
HBO
Schafer says Euphoria‘s heavy true-to-life material made the cast get familiar with one another quickly. “I feel like you’re bonded in a way that a lot of other casts may not be right off the bat,” she says. “It kind of puts your friendships in hyper-speed working in an environment like this where you have to be real with each other and vulnerable on set together.”
The show’s intimate scenes were so vulnerable, in fact, that HBO hired a sex coordinator to make sure the actors felt secure every step of the way.
Silberman: We all knew how to be authentic about female friendship. We didn’t want this to be “female Superbad,” with women just saying things men say. We wanted it to be kind. People think comedy can’t be nice or earnest because you’ll lose the humor, but we set a challenge for ourselves—we wanted to make it funny without there really being a bad guy.
Courtesy of Annapurna Pictures
Yeah, there’s a girl-on-girl revenge or clique v. clique dynamic that just doesn’t exist in this movie. That’s another hallmark of the high school movie Booksmart discards.
Dever: It asks the audience to maybe judge people a little less, and to treat each other with kindness and compassion. You never know—the popular kid might not be mean. The party girl might not really want to be a party girl. There’s always more to a person.
It feels like Booksmart is hitting at this moment where we are seeing, more than ever, female friends being outrageously supportive of each other onscreen. It fits nicely with Broad City, Insecure, PEN15, The Bold Type…
Feldstein: And Playing House [the USA series starring Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair]! That’s an obsession of mine.
Dever: A best friend relationship can be so intense, and reading this script and seeing that—it was so exciting for me, because I rarely get sent a comedy for young women. Now I’m hearing girls who have seen Booksmart say that it makes them feel very seen. I think people are craving stories like this.
Silberman: What I love about so many shows and movies like that is that real friends—like Abbi and Ilana in Broad City or Maya and Anna in PEN15—make them. It’s not a coincidence that those friendships feel so lived in and authentic.
How did you create that kind of real-friend vibe on set?
Feldstein: Kaitlyn and I lived together [before and during the shoot]. We had a two-bedroom rental in West Hollywood. We wanted to be at a point where we had our own jokes, our own rapport, our own snacks. By the time we were filming, we were like, “It’s time for her to have her iced tea!” “Oh, I know where she is, she must be in the bathroom!” We were so connected. I would have been devastated if I watched Booksmart and found out that me and Kaitlyn weren’t friends. So, the good news is: It’s a very real love.
Megan Angelo is the author ofFollowers, which will be published in January 2020. After watching Booksmart, she tried to pull off this blue jumpsuit, but ultimately was unable to do so.
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
For the 14 years I spent competing in pageants, the preparation leading up to a competition weekend was always the same: Go to the hairdresser to get my sewn-in weave uninstalled, my hairline relaxed, and then the weave sewn right back in. The routine took anywhere from six to eight hours and cost hundreds of dollars.
After, I would fret with my mom and aunt about how limited I was with the hairstyles I could do because I had a full weave; if I could just wear my natural hair, this wouldn’t be so complicated. But the idea that I would walk out with my own hair for competition was ludicrous: Years of weaves, relaxers, and just simply not caring for my hair properly left it breaking and my edges thin. But more than that, what was really stopping me from embracing my natural kinks and curls was a truth over which I had no control: I had never seen a Black girl with my hair texture wear her natural hair for competition, let alone win or place with it.
There’s a rule in pageantry that most competitors and coaches know about but never speak out loud: The default beauty standard is white. Although Miss America, Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss Universe have crowned a handful non-white women, most of these women wear “pageant hair”—flowing weaves and extensions with bouncy waves and curls. As a competitor, I wasn’t one to rock the boat. Even with an “acceptable” look, I had to listen to photographers and hairstylists make backhanded comments about my hair, how difficult it was to style and blend with extensions. Pageants did help me feel empowered, but they could also make me feel dejected, especially when it came to my hair.
When a Black girl wins, comments on Instagram and message boards show the darker side of our experience. “The pageant is no longer about beauty,” one person wrote on Instagram after Kaleigh Garris—an 18-year-old who wore her natural curly hair for competition—won Miss Teen USA last week. “It’s all about political correctness.” In other words, Garris didn’t win because she deserved the crown, the user felt, but because she’s Black. I saw dozens of similar comments when Cheslie Kyrst, a 27-year-old attorney from North Carolina, won Miss USA over apparent fan favorite, Alejandra Gonzalez of New Mexico. Like Garris, Kyrst is Black and wore her natural hair. (The current Miss America, Nia Franklin, is also a Black woman, marking the first time all three title-holders are Black, but chose to wear a more traditional pageant look for competition.) When you’re a Black woman in pageants—or just a Black woman who succeeds, period—the dominant culture will do its best to communicate to you that your win was not earned, but handed to you to fulfill a quota. Your achievements are not your own; they’re a box for someone else to check.
Former Miss USA Deshauna Barber, who won in 2016, has spoken about the racism she faced during her reign and her decision to wear her 4c hair for her final walk. She’s also addressed how hard it can be to push an institution like this one into the future when pockets of it seem stuck determinedly in the past. “When you’re crowned with a look, then that’s the look you’re expected to maintain. A lot of people in the pageant world are still very old school. They believe in a traditional look, a traditional Miss USA. [The organization] is trying to, in my opinion, open up that world,” Barber wrote in an essay for Refinery29 in 2017. “So, when I said I wanted to wear my natural hair, they were jumping for joy. I appreciate them for that—[but] I didn’t want to stretch it too much. I wanted to take baby steps. If I take a small one by showing my natural 4c hair, the next girl will take one, and then we’ll ease our natural hairstyles into the pageant community.”
Junior high is, for me at least, a time worth forgetting. That formative, cringe-inducing time was filled with angst, cliques, and a whole lot of acne. So watching Hulu‘s PEN15, a coming-of-age comedy following two seventh grade girls in the year 2000, was a mixed experience: The rush of seeing the early aughts return, the uncomfortable twinges from remembering the growing pains of those years.
It’s just so scarily accurate. The pivotal slow dance to K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life.” Early AIM experiments with away messages, “hot singles” chatrooms, and desperate pleas to your parents to stay off the phone while you’re on the Internet. Gel pens. B*Witched. Butterfly clips. Middle parts. Regret all around.
[embedded content]
There’s a moment in episode three—”Ojichan”—that many woman might find as deeply relatable as I did, regardless of whether a TigerBeat poster of Jonathan Taylor Thomas was on the bedroom wall or not. After spending the majority of the episode masturbating and being consumed by shame over it—to the point that she’s literally haunted by the prospect of her dead grandpa knowing what she’s up to—a distraught Maya (Maya Erskine) confesses to her best friend Anna (Anna Konkle), “I’m like Sam [their male friend who was caught looking at porn earlier in the episode], only I’m grosser because I’m a girl and I’m a pervert. And I really shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”
That scene alone is proof why I so desperately needed a show like PEN15 when I was younger. Sam and his buddies crack as many sex jokes as you’d expect from a group of adolescent boys, gathering after school to try and catch a glimpse of boobs on the Spice channel. It’s accepted as normal, something we’ve seen onscreen so many times that it’s become a cliché: Horny Teen Boys.
But I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen a teen series tackle female masturbation, and I was 30 when I saw most of them. Maya feels guilt over something boys are taught to boast about because, like me, she grew up without a show like PEN15 or Netflix’s Sex Education and Big Mouth to reassure her that what she’s doing is normal. To show her that many other girls her age are just as weird and awkward—and, yes, gross—as the boys. That she’s never grosser simply because she is a girl.
Alex Lombardi
“Gross” is definitely something PEN15 leans into—and in doing so, it’s groundbreaking. The fact that Erskine and Konkle are adults playing teen versions of themselves allows them to depict their characters’ burgeoning sexualities with an attention to detail that would be impossible with a younger actor. The first time Maya masturbates, it’s seconds after she’d been playing with two My Little Pony dolls, pressing their nuzzles together to have them make out. It’s deeply realistic—my Barbies were “having sex” with Ken before I even knew what sex really was—because, in the words of Britney Spears, she’s “not a girl, not yet a woman.” Despite knowing I’m not watching an actual teen grind against pillows or wipe her hand on her bedroom carpet when she’s finished, it was hard not to feel challenged by PEN15‘s unflinching portrayal of something I’m accustomed to seeing from only males onscreen. Maya’s shame is my shame, and that’s hard to shake—no matter how many decades I’ve had to unlearn what the patriarchy taught me.
The thing is, puberty is a nightmare. For too long, girls have been relegated to the sidelines in these stories, limited to being some sort of Winnie Cooper type—a chaste, flawless object of affection with perfect manners and not a single zit. But we aren’t immune to the horrors of adolescence; girls can be just as raunchy, just as cruel, just as dorky as the boys who have dominated pop culture’s coming-of-age stories for so long.
Once Netflix’s To All the Boys I Loved Before became a bonafide hit, the Internet had a field day meme-ifying it. There’s the one that poked fun at Lara Jean’s not-so-stealth attempt to hide from the guys who received her love letters, the shot of fans googling Noah Centineo’s age (guilty as charged), and the hundreds of tweets gushing about that hot tub scene. However, the meme that intrigued me the most had nothing to do with Peter Kavinsky: It was a mashup comparing Lara Jean’s dad, Dr. Covey, to Dr. Stratford, the father in 10 Things I Hate About You.
Specifically, the meme compares how Dr. Covey (John Corbett) and Dr. Stratford (Larry Miller), both widowed gynecologists, stumble through “the talk” with their teen daughters. On the surface, it’s an apt comparison; but if you look deeper, the juxtaposition exposes the divide between contemporary on-screen fathers with movie dads of yesteryear. Or, put more bluntly, they’re getting woke. (And hotter. Looking at you, Josh Duhamel.)
In 10 Things, for example, Dr. Stratford puts his daughter in a fat suit and warns her, “Every time you even think about kissing a boy I want you to picture wearing [a fake pregnant belly] under your halter top.” But Dr. Covey tries to have a thoughtful conversation with Lara Jean about her reproductive choices, telling her, “Did you know most unwanted teenage pregnancies are the result of expecting abstinence?”
Dr. Covey isn’t the only movie dad leaning into a more nuanced, emotionally available relationship with their teen this year. In the Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name Elio’s father, Professor Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), comforts his newly heartbroken son by delivering an epic monologue. “You had a beautiful friendship, maybe more than a friendship,” he says of Elio’s relationship with an older man. “I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, to pray that their sons land on their feet. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it.” Not only is Elio’s father understanding of his emotions, he tells him to revel in their messiness, to take in the pain.
Michael Stuhlbarg (left) as Professor Perlman in Call Me By Your Name
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
In Love, Simon, the first major Hollywood studio film to focus on a gay teen romance, Simon also finds solace in his family. While his father—former leading man turned on-screen zaddy Josh Duhamel as Jack—isn’t quite as hip to his son’s sexual orientation as Stuhlbarg’s character, once Simon does come out to his dad, he’s distraught that he didn’t realize on his own. “[My character] is upset with himself for not paying closer attention,” Duhamel tells Glamour. “I can understand why he would feel guilty about that. That [Simon] felt that he had to hide from [his dad] for so long. That he wasn’t available to him to make him feel comfortable.” In the past, we might have applauded Duhamel’s character for so readily accepting his son’s sexuality; in 2018, though, he’s forced to grapple with why he was so blind to his son in the first place.
Josh Duhamel (right) as Jack in Love, Simon
Photo by Ben Rothstein
This trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, either. In The Hate U Give, out this October, protagonist Starr’s father, Maverick (Russell Hornsby), empowers her to become a champion for Black Lives Matter after witnessing a shooting at the hands of the police. “When you’re ready to talk, don’t ever let nobody make you be quiet,” he says at one point in the film.
PHOTO: Photo Credit: ERIKA DOSS
Russell Hornsby (left) as Maverick Carter in The Hate U Give
Photo by Erika Doss
Bo Burnham wrote and directed this summer’s Eighth Grade, which also features a dorky-cute single dad, Mark (Josh Hamilton), to a young teenage girl. Burnham is quick to acknowledge the uptick in good-guy fathers. “Good parents [were] kind of underrepresented in film [until now],” he says. “They don’t naturally lend themselves to drama as easily.”
But for Burnham, creating a well-intentioned father better reflected the parents he’s encountered in his life, including his own, than the distant fathers of the John Hughes era. “There’s probably slightly more of my mother in [Mark] than my father,” he says. “My mom would tell me I’m super cool all the time, but my dad was always in his boxers, shirtless, in my doorway, so that image [in the film] was certainly my father.”
PHOTO: Linda Kallerus
Josh Hamilton (right) as Mark Day in Eighth Grade
Photo by Linda Kallerus, courtesy of A24
Like Dr. Covey, Mark is constantly trying to get his daughter to let him in emotionally. This tension mirrors Burnham’s real-life experience. “My memories of fights with my parents were them trying to connect with me and me pushing them away,” he says, “rather than them not letting me listen to rock and roll music and me storming off into a quarry of whatever usually happens [in teen films].”
Similarly, Jenny Han, who wrote the novel To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is based on, thinks Dr. Covey is much more representative of today’s dads—and modern, evolved men as a whole. “People are [talking] not just about Dr. Covey, but about Peter too,” she explains. “People appreciate [them] in a way where they’re noticing how thoughtful they are. There’s a general appreciation for these men who are kind and just a bit more sensitive than we’ve seen.” In other words, it’s their awareness and empathy that makes them both heartthrobs.
PHOTO: Awesomeness Films
John Corbett (left) as Dr. Covey in To All the Boys I Loved Before
Courtesy of Netflix
Han’s inspiration for the white wine drinking, cupcake making Dr. Covey actually came from a family she worked for during graduate school. “I was a nanny to a young teen who was an only child,” she says. “Her mom traveled a lot for work, so her dad did a lot of the day to day stuff. I was thinking about how caring he was and really attuned, just like Dr. Covey, [who is] the dad of three girls who lost their mom. He has his limitations, but we see him trying. You see him again and again try his best—not being perfect, but trying.”
That’s the other thing that unites these fathers. They might not always get it right—like in Eighth Grade, when Mark makes the misstep of following his daughter to the mall—but they never stop fighting to do better, to be closer to their kids. Whether it’s through having frank conversations about sexuality, or knowing when to take your daughter to her favorite diner (hat tip to Dr. Covey), these dads represent a whole new generation of fathers. They’re dads who aren’t afraid afraid to lean into the supportive space once reserved only for moms.
Maybe it’s my own daddy issues, or that the news cycle is a never-ending parade of garbage men making garbage choices, but these good male role models have become my escape. On the days when there aren’t any new photos of Barack Obama on vacation or Justin Trudeau doing anything, it’s a comfort to know I can turn on Netflix and bask in the nerdy fatherly wisdom of Dr. Covey. And for a moment, all will feel right in the world.
Samantha Leach is an assistant editor at Glamour.
Photos courtesy of Netflix, A24, Twentieth Century Fox, and Sony Pictures Classics.
A red carpet featuring Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Miu Miu, Coach, Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, Fausto Puglisi… Would you believe we were describing the 2018 Teen Choice Awards?
Once again, we’re reminded that young Hollywood is providing us some of the best, most exciting red-carpet fashion, as celebrities gathered to celebrate teen audiences and entertainment on Sunday night. There were bold, embellished gowns (Lili Reinhart, in Monique Lhuillier)! Polished evening suiting (Chloe Grace Moretz, in Louis Vuitton)! Fancy-as-hell matching sets (Madelaine Petsch in Giambattista Valli and Vanessa Morgan)! Seriously, the Teen Choice Awards are not an event to sleep on.
Check out 20 looks from the 2018 Teen Choice Awards you can’t miss, ahead.
We bring you the trends. You make them your own. Sign up for our daily newsletter to find the best fashion for YOU.
