Challengers' Sexy Hotel Scene Answered An Important Question For The Film

It's safe to say first-time feature screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes came out of the gate hot with his first produced screenplay. "Challengers," the erotic tennis thriller starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor, was one of /Film's most anticipated films of 2024, and the movie lived up to our sky-high expectations by being a mesmerizing (and, yes, sexy) drama about three people locked in a deep and unconventional relationship.

But interestingly, one of the film's most important scenes was not in its first draft. I spoke to Kuritzkes this week in advance of the film's release, and he told me about how a story idea from director Luca Guadagnino eventually evolved into one of the movie's most famous moments:

"One of the first conversations we had was that Luca said, 'In a love triangle, all the corners should touch.' I heard that, and I thought, 'Yeah, all these people's lives are so deeply intwined, and there's all this desire flowing between all three of them. They're touching.' And it quickly became clear that Luca meant, 'No, no, literally. They literally should all touch.'"

Kuritzkes says he was "thrilled" by that idea, and the end result is a moment in which tennis phenom Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), while visiting fellow players Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor) in their hotel room one night, initiates a three-way make-out session that culminates with the two boys kissing each other as Tashi watches. But pinpointing exactly when the moment should take place in the movie's propulsive, time-jumping narrative? That was the big question that needed answering.

The scene illuminates so much about these three characters and their individual relationships to one other, making clear that this triangle functions best when each component is drawn to the other two, sometimes in ways that are so primal they don't even know how to verbalize them. Kuritzkes continued:

"The question then became how to make [them all touch] in a way that felt earned and organic and that deepened the dynamics in the story that was already there and already happening between the characters and didn't shift everything too radically so that we lost the structure of the movie or what happened in the movie, because we felt really good about that. So the question became where to place it, and how to give it the proper runway so that it felt like it was always there, you know? 

That was something that came about through a lot of conversations with me and Luca, and me trying things, and us talking about it. Then finally the thing I arrived on, which was having it happen when they're juniors in that hotel room, that became something that instantly felt right to all of us, and now it's one of my favorite scenes in the movie."

The scene became the centerpiece of the film's marketing, and given all of the discourse around the "necessity" of sex on screen in the past few years (BTW, we think they're absolutely necessary), I'm encouraged that Amazon/MGM felt comfortable enough leaning in to this imagery as one of the key selling points. That approach seems to be working, and we'll see if this terrific movie's box office receipts help launch Zendaya to even higher heights as one of Hollywood's most promising young stars.

I spoke about "Challengers" with /Film editor BJ Colangelo on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which also includes my full interview with Justin Kuritzkes. You can hear the whole conversation below:

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