Bottoms director on making one of this year’s funniest comedies with her Shiva Baby follow-up

Nov. 2, 2023

Exclusive: Director Emma Seligman talks online support for her new film, working with Charli XCX, and giving Marshawn Lynch his debut movie role

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How far would you go to impress your high school crush? Well, for high school students PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), the protagonists and “ugly, untalented gays” in Bottoms, this involves starting an extracurricular fight club and fabricating a sordid summer break spent in juvie. They’re hoping to impress cheerleaders Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), who are beautiful, popular, and – worst of all – ostensibly heterosexual.

For a while, it seemed like the movie, which is the second feature from Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman, may not even get a UK release date, premiering on Prime Video instead outside of the US. “I’m so happy that it’s coming here,” Seligman says when we sit down to chat at a central London hotel. “I really hoped that it would, because I felt like UK audiences might appreciate it on a different level.”

Sophomore season

“But thinking about it in retrospect, when I started writing Bottoms, I was 22 and so I didn’t have much more life experience beyond figuring out the turmoil of, like, wanting validation and acceptance, and going about that through sex and romance and dating and whatnot. So, it makes sense that that’s the only thing I could come up with,” she laughs.

Bottoms wears its silliness on its sleeve, lovingly parodying ’90s and ’00s teen movies. Seligman cites a range of movies as inspiration for the film, including high school movies like Saved!,Bring It On, andShe’s the Man(along with Wet Hot American Summer, Grease, and American Graffiti). In an homage to teen movies past, Bottoms ends with a blooper reel, which Seligman says she “fought very hard” to keep in the final cut. “I missed blooper end credit sequences! I was happy that I won that battle.”

But there’s also the bloodier side of Bottoms, for which she says she looked to action flicks likeKick-AssandAttack the Block. Filming the movie’s fight scenes was “challenging, but really fun and exciting to flex a different muscle and learn a whole aspect of filmmaking that I had zero familiarity with before. Very empowering.”

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Setting up a fight club in your high school gymnasium is easier than PJ and Josie anticipate – as long as they can get a faculty member to supervise the group. The pair rope in their clueless (and newly divorced) teacher Mr. G, played by former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch. “We wanted someone unexpected for the role – originally, we were thinking more down the line of a dramatic actor who’d never done comedy before, and that wasn’t really working out,” Seligman explains.

She admits that she didn’t know who Lynch was until she watched his episode of improv comedy Murderville, but that was all the convincing she needed. “We just offered it to him,” she continues. “We had a few conversations because I think he was surprised by the casting and wanted to make sure that I was trustworthy – that I was going to, like, take care of him because this was his first movie. I think he ended up taking it on, from what he told me, because his sister is queer and it felt important to him to do that for her.”

Seligman tells us that the hyperpop singer-songwriter was a fan of Shiva Baby and struck up a friendship with Sennott after watching it. “She offered to work on Bottoms in a way where I think she thought she was offering to do a song or something, and then I just asked her to do the score. Because I thought, when am I going to get this opportunity again, to have my dream artist offering themselves up to me?” Seligman says. “She understood the tone of the movie. She’s got such a wide range of emotions in her work and such a cool style that elevated the movie. I don’t know how else we would have achieved that with a regular score.”

The music of Bottoms captures the movie’s energy: it’s bold, fun, and fresh. Like PJ and Josie, Seligman pulled no punches to get what she wanted. She tells us that “no one wanted” the film before production company Orion eventually came on board, and it’s hard not to draw similarities between the movie and its protagonists. No one wants you, until the hottest girl in school is making out with you on a football field – or Charli XCX is asking to work with you and people on Twitter are clamoring to see your movie on the big screen. The first rule of this fight club? Shoot your shot.

Bottoms is released in UK cinemas on November 3. For more, check out our guide to the rest of this year’s biggestmovie release dates.

I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.

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