Challengers, a movie starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, is a sports drama whose love triangle plot has taken social media by storm.
And it seems that its writer’s real-life romance has got TikTok in a tizzy, too.
Justin Kuritzkes, the movie’s screenwriter, is ― as TikToker @marmaryeesa2022 pointed out in their video ― married to fellow director and writer Celine Song.
In fact, fans couldn’t help but notice quite a few similarities between Challengers and Celine’s 2023 movie, Past Lives.
Why?
Both movies deal with a complicated love triangle and centre a female character in the middle of the drama.
Past Lives is the story of how Na Young and Hae Sung, who were childhood friends in Korea, reconnect with each other twenty years after Na moved to the US.
Na (now Nora Moon) is married to Arthur when she meets Hae again, making their resurfaced bond... complicated.
Meanwhile, Challengers involves a professional tennis player, Art, whose career is managed by his former pro tennis player wife Tashi.
To help Art through a crisis of confidence, Tashi suggests he play in a smaller-stakes league ― where he goes up against his ex-best friend Patrick, who just so happens to be Tashi’s former lover.
Both Celine and Justin have explained that the movies aren’t about their lives
While TikToker @marmaryeesa2022 commented that “it’s interesting to see love portrayed in such a painful and messy way” by both members of the married couple and even hinted that the movies are based on their personal lives, Justin Kuritzke himself told IndieWire, “Challengers is a pure fantasy for me.”
He adds that the movie idea “really came out of this desire to have information about the matches I was watching. It was really something that I think a lot of people who watch tennis do, which is that you transpose a personality onto the player from these little crumbs that you’re given.”
Meanwhile, Celine also told IndieWire that the script for Past Lives came from “sitting there with my childhood sweetheart and my American husband and translating between the two of them.”
“As we’re sitting there, because we were such a weird trio, I could see that in the bar, people are looking at us trying to figure out who we are to each other,” she added.
If the TikToks are anything to go by, it looks like that kind of speculation may continue.