15 "Challengers" Behind-The-Scenes Facts That'll Make You Watch The Movie In A Whole New Way
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There are obviously MASSIVE spoilers ahead for Challengers!
1.First, the original Challengers script didn't include the scene when Tashi, Art, and Patrick are kissing on their hotel beds and then it leads to Art and Patrick making out while Tashi watches. Writer Justin Kuritzkes said director Luca Guadagnino "encouraged" him to write the scene.
Justin told Variety, "Luca felt it was very important that, in any love triangle, all the corners touch, and I quickly realized he meant it literally."
In an interview with the New York Times, Luca also talked about the scene, saying, "Tashi sees it and makes it happen. For many ways, it's of her own amusement, which is not just erotic amusement but pushing them to be a better person in general."
2.For the scene where Art and Patrick hang out at Stanford and share a churro, the duo eating churros wasn't in the script but rather something Luca, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor came up with on the day of filming.
Explaining the scene with the New York Times, Luca said, "What we see is basically, a sort of like, a game of revelry, a sparkling between these two young boys, over Tashi, but at the same time, a jealousy that ignites the relationship. Also, because probably, these two guys are also jealous of one another, not only of Tashi."
He also added, "When the sugar goes on the cheek of Patrick, Art takes it off with his hand in a very nice gesture of kindness and very intimate I would say. But at the same time, they are really, like, tense."
3.Also, Mike explained that Art biting Patrick's churro wasn't scripted either, but something he just did in the moment after seeing Josh holding the churro so close to his mouth.
He said, "So when Josh is holding that churro right to my mouth, it’s so obviously there that I’m going to take a bite of his churro. But that’s the great thing about working with Josh: He tees you up for something, and I hit the ball back. It's like a game of tennis — we’re just giving each other something to play with."
4.The umpire at the New Rochelle final, where Art and Patrick play against each other, is portrayed by Darnell Appling, who is Zendaya's longtime assistant and friend. He previously appeared as a fan who swarms MJ and Peter outside their school in Spider-Man: No Way Home, too.
Speaking to Vulture at the LA premiere of Challengers, Darnell said he thought he was just sitting on the umpire stand as a stand-in until Luca asked him to be in the movie. He recalled, "I came down, and Luca said, 'I feel like you have a strong spirit of truth and justice and was wondering if you could play the umpire.' I said it was totally up to [Zendaya], who said, 'Absolutely!' It was all Luca who'd seen my aura and what is surrounding me. It is true! Truth and justice, that's all me."
Darnell is also credited as an associate producer on Challengers.
5.The "I Told Ya" T-shirt that Tashi and Patrick both wear in the movie is a reference to a paparazzi photo of John F. Kennedy Jr., who was wearing the shirt. The "I Told Ya" slogan has a connection to the inaugural buttons for President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
MGM / Warner Bros, Ken Katz / startraksphoto.com
Jonathan Anderson, the costume designer for the movie, said he was also inspired by JFK Jr.'s style when designing the costumes for Patrick.
He explained, "When JFK Jr. was younger, in the '80s and '90s, there was kind of an effortlessness to his wardrobe — like, he could wear anything and sex appeal would always be there."
6.The moment when the crowd is looking back and forth as Art and Patrick play each other, but Tashi is looking straight ahead, is an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Luca Guadagnino explained, "For me, [it's] the greatest tennis match seen on screen."
7.Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross created the mesmerizing score for Challengers, which was inspired by Berlin techno and '90s rave music. The duo had previously worked on Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All.
Trent and Atticus have worked together on scores for nearly 15 years, including The Social Network in 2010, which earned them an Academy Award for Best Original Score.
The duo won Best Original Score again in 2021 for Pixar's Soul.
8.Justin Kuritzkes said he was originally inspired by the 2018 US Open, and infamous final match where Naomi Osaka beat Serena Williams to win her first Grand Slam title. The "controversial" game included Serena pleading with the umpire after she received a penalty for reportedly receiving signals from her coach in the stands.
Matthew Stockman / Getty Images, Michael Owens / Getty Images
Justin recalled that seeing that moment play out made him realize how "cinematic the situation could be: how alone each player was, yet how linked to each other."
He added that the 2018 US Open was when he started watching tennis all the time, and that's when he found the world of Challenger tournaments. He said, "Although the stands at a Challenger are mostly empty, the players' emotions are just as if they were at the US Open because they’re fighting for their lives. It’s the humiliation of being a gladiator, and nobody's even there to watch you die."
9.Former tennis player and current coach Brad Gilbert was the tennis coach and consultant on Challengers. While the script had "all the directions" for how each point would go, it was Brad's job to choreograph and "write out each point."
Brad explained, "So I needed to write out each point, like a play-by-play. Something like, 'This is a seven-ball rally, forehand to forehand,' and so on. And then, once you're actually filming the seven-ball rally, you've got to do the same seven-ball rally over every single time until you get it right." While practicing in Boston prior to filming, Brad said Luca would also give notes on how points would play out, too.
After filming Challengers, Brad went on to coach Coco Gauff to her first US Open win in 2023.
10.Zendaya, Mike, and Josh trained for six weeks at a country club outside of Boston before filming began, where they were coached by Brad and his wife Kim Gilbert. Each actor was on their own court as they trained.
Zendaya / Instagram / Via instagram.com
Prior to arriving in Boston, Brad also trained with Zendaya for a couple of months in LA. She worked with a trainer and then worked on technique, namely copying techniques of real tennis players.
Brad would send Zendaya videos of Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova to watch and study, and he took her to several college matches at Pepperdine and UCLA.
11.For the tennis games, in order for the volleys and points to exactly match the script and Brad's choreography, the actors were only holding the racket's handle. They were able to swing with the intensity that professional tennis players exhibit, and then the ball and head of the racket were added using CGI.
Speaking about the CGI used in the tennis scenes, Zendaya explained that she used her dance background to treat the tennis moves like dance choreography.
She added, "For all the tennis sequences, [they are] meticulously choreographed. So we just treated it like choreography, and I tried to mirror [my tennis double] as much as I could and get the form."
12.Mike began training for Challengers right after he finished filming West Side Story (2021). In order to gain weight and muscle for the role of Art Donaldson, tennis coach Brad Gilbert said Mike "had to eat between 8,000 and 10,000 calories a day."
20th Century Fox, MGM / Warner Bros / Via youtu.be
After being lean for his role in West Side Story, Mike had to gain "like 30 pounds" for Challengers. Brad also added that Zendaya and Josh started training much earlier than Mike because he was still filming West Side Story at the time.
13.Writer Justin Kuritzkes said from the beginning he wanted Tashi Duncan to be portrayed by a Black actor because "the story of American tennis is Black women for the past however many decades." When Zendaya was interested in the project, Justin said it was perfect because "the cultural space that Zendaya occupies in the world is the space that the character Tashi was supposed to occupy — that was the life she was supposed to have."
He added, "I also knew that I didn't want to not specify the races of the characters. That always feels to me like you’re avoiding something. Her being a Black woman informs a lot about how she navigates her situation and how she navigates her relationship with these guys."
14.Luca visited Zendaya on the set of Dune: Part Two in order to complete ADR, aka re-recording some of an actor's dialogue while a movie is in post-production, for Challengers. Zendaya literally completed it in between filming scenes for Dune: Part Two.
Luca recalled, “I went to Budapest to meet Z and Timmy [Chalamet], and we were doing ADR for Z on Challengers, and we did that on [the Dune: Part Two] backlot." While visiting, Luca also got to walk onto one of the big Dune: Part Two sets, too.
Of course, Luca previously worked with Timothée on Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All.
15.And finally, each scene was only filmed once or twice, which surprised Zendaya because that meant everything moved "super fast." Luca says he likes approaching his movies this way because if a performance is great, it "doesn't need to take 90 takes."
Luca added, "It’s exciting when you observe performance. I will quit the moment in which I know that I’m going to be lazy or bored or I don’t have this energy of seeing performance happening."
One moment Luca recalled that stressed the importance of only filming a scene a few times for him was when he watched Mike pick at his fingernails while he was anxious before the scene when Tashi, Art, and Patrick kiss in the hotel room. Luca called the gesture "fantastic" and asked Mike to do it on camera, and he didn't need him to perform that scene more than necessary.
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