How “Anyone but You” navigated shark-infested waters and rom-com tropes

Despite filming in shark country (a.k.a. Australia), 'Easy A' writer-director Will Gluck says his new rom-com only sinks its teeth into his favorite tropes.

Making a romantic-comedy doesn’t usually involve a shark cage. But Anyone but You, out Dec. 22, had to contend with Jaws-level challenges behind the scenes.

The rom-com stars Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) as Bea and Ben, exes who despise each other yet pretend to date over the course of a destination wedding in Australia. And filming in Australia means taking the “enemies to lovers” trope to the next level — with Australia’s natural predators as offscreen foes. 

“A big part of the movie was filmed in Sydney Harbor on a boat with them floating on a buoy in the middle of the harbor at night,” director Will Gluck, who co-wrote the script with Ilana Wolpert, explains to EW. “Initially they wouldn't give us permission because it's a huge shark area and people get hurt by sharks all the time there.” That meant every time an actor or stunt double filmed in the water, they had to do so with a huge shark tank around it. “A shark tank is these floating buoys with a cage,” Gluck notes. “It was a little bit scary and strange at 3 in the morning with our actors swimming into a shark tank, knowing that they're at a place where sharks like to hang out.”

The production employed shark consultants to advise on best practices, only to learn that the more activity in an area, the more sharks it will draw. Thus, the longer they shot and the more that was happening in a scene, the more sharks they had to contend with. But no actors (or sharks for that matter) were harmed in the making of Anyone but You — and the only bite we’ll see on screen is the edge that comes with the “enemies to lovers” banter of its leads. 

The movie is loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Bea from Beatrice; Ben from Benedick), but don’t get too hung up on the Bard’s involvement. Gluck is no stranger to adapting classic literature into contemporary rom-coms; his 2010 hit Easy A with Emma Stone drew its central conceit from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Yet, he posits his work is more akin to projects like 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s the Man, riffing on the storytelling model Shakespeare set for most of the Western world centuries ago.

“Enemies to lovers and fake dating — people think they’re romantic-comedy tropes,” Gluck says. “But Shakespeare created them. It's just a good story. We're not going out there saying, ‘This is based on Much Ado About Nothing.’ When people hear that, they think it's homework. We just gave nods with the character names and certain things, but it [comes down to] Shakespeare knows how to tell a story and we're using him as our inspiration.”

Gluck also emphasizes the importance of his characters’ self-awareness and groundedness as key to playing with these time-honored tropes. “I don't like stuff that could never happen in real life,” he notes. “Even though it's fake dating and enemies to lovers, it's walking the line of, ‘It's not crazy. This could happen. I could see myself at a wedding having to do this.’ The characters in our movie know that fake dating is a trope. When you have characters that have no idea and think that they're the first ever to decide to do something together, then it becomes a little bananas.”

What Gluck did want to be larger-than-life was his ensemble. While Sweeney and Powell are the couple at the center of it all, they’re surrounded by a 12-person troupe that includes Hadley Robinson (Winning Time) and Alexandra Shipp (Barbie) as the soon-to-be-married couple; Darren Barnet (Never Have I Ever) as Bea’s ex-boyfriend; and Dermot Mulroney, Rachel Griffiths, Bryan Brown, and Michelle Hurd as parents of the bride(s).

Mulroney, of course, is rom-com royalty with classics like My Best Friend’s Wedding, The Wedding Date, and The Family Stone to his credit, a fact which did not escape the cast or crew.

“One of the early weeks we had a [group] screening of My Best Friend's Wedding,” Gluck reveals. “It was emotional because it was like Dermot was passing the torch to Glen.”

With that big ensemble comes big-screen intentions. While it’s been over a decade since Gluck has made a rom-com, he says that he doesn’t feel the genre has changed so much as our expectations around it and its viewing format. “Most rom-coms people now consider [are for] streaming,” he reflects. “I made a big effort to make this theatrical — it’s shot on location in Australia, there’s a lot of musical elements. A big part of watching rom-coms is with people at theaters and having that experience. We all say there's nothing like having fun with people in a theater and feeling the contagion of laughter and romance, yet we all watch rom-coms at home. That’s a solitary experience. Hopefully, this will be much more of a group experience.”

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