All Your Challengers Questions, Answered by Challengers Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes

Photograph: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

This interview contains major spoilers for Challengers.

Movies are back, baby! Luca Guadagnino’s sexy, sweaty tennis-threeway movie Challengers won last weekend in the zeitgeist as well as at the box office, dominating group chats, social media feeds, and even the GQ Slack.

In this post-monolithic age of media consumption, it’s increasingly rare for any release—barring peak Marvel or juggernautish new studio albums by the likes of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift—to become that central to the conversation. But over the course of this week, everywhere you went, people were talking about Challengers’s Tashi, Art, and Patrick—the obscenely good-looking threesome at the center of the story, played by the red-hot trio of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist—and the questions the film leaves unanswered.

Did they really make out at Applebee’s? What was up with Patrick’s bruise? When you're naming a guy in a movie script in 2024, how do you land on the name “Art Donaldson”? We circled back with Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes to ask these questions, and a few others that have been on everybody's mind.

1. Where does one get a name like “Art Donaldson”?

Mike Faist's character’s name has interestingly, become a polarizing, much-discussed aspect of the film. I told Kuritzkes it felt like a name right out of a ’30s screwball comedy like The Philadelphia Story.

“There's something about it that sounds very good-natured and all-American,” he says. “It sounds like the kind of name that a big tennis star could have and that people would get behind. That sounds like a guy you can trust—Art Donaldson.”

“There's other inspirations for why all their names are the way they are, but they're too embarrassing to talk about,” he adds. After a beat though, he acquiesces: “I'll say, with Art, that there is some inspiration of Art Garfunkel from Carnal Knowledge.”

2. What’s up with Patrick’s mysterious bruise?

In the final match, we catch a glimpse of a pretty nasty bruise on Patrick's arm. “He's about to serve and he, I think, scratches his arm and there's a closeup of a bruise in the crook of his arm,” says GQ’s style editor Yang-Yi Goh. “It seemed to indicate that he was a drug user, but then it was never addressed or came back up again and had no bearing on the plot.” That bruise has become a subject of speculation online, where theories have ranged everywhere from drug use to donating blood for money.

“I can confirm it’s not that,” Kuritzkes says, when I run the drug theory by him. “If you watch the movie closely, you'll see where he got that bruise and who gave it to him.” (Upon investigating, GQ’s associate social media manager Carolina Gonzalez concludes that it was from Tashi hitting Patrick in the arm the night before.)

3. How did they land on the Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich?

When Patrick registers for the Challenger event in New Rochelle, he stares longingly at what GQ style writer Eileen Cartter calls “the most improbably beautiful Dunkin' sandwich you've ever seen,” as an ATP official at registration prepares to eat it. Those Dunkin’ sandwiches cost as little as $5.29 and at the most, $7.69—providing a shorthand for Patrick’s financial situation. Initially though, Kuritzkes had a McMuffin ($7.29) in his script. Why did they ultimately decide to go with that sandwich?

Kuritzkes credits the film’s property masters Matt Marks and Mike Drury for the stroke of genius. “That day, they brought out four different sandwiches and Luca had to choose one,” he says. “There was a discussion that we were all having about, which one of these feels most authentic to New Rochelle? Which one of these sandwiches would this ATP official really be eating? Would it be a bodega-looking sandwich that you can get in New York, or would it be a Dunkin' sandwich?”

In the end, they went with the sandwich America runs on. “I really love that detail,” Kuritzkes says, “because him looking at that with so much desire tells you everything about what's going on with him.”

4. Is the Applebee’s in Cincinnati really the ATP tour’s makeout capital?

When Tashi and Art reconnect, they end up making out in the parking lot of a Cincinnati Applebee’s. Why did that seem like the right place for that? “It’s a very big thing to tennis players on the circuit,” Kuritzkes says. “That Applebee's is pretty famous for being the spot that everybody at the Cincinnati Open will eat at.”

The idea actually came from one of the researchers in the art department, who suggested the specific branch after reading a 2014 New York Times article by Ben Rothenberg about the phenomenon of the ATP’s top talent swarming that specific Applebee’s.

“Funnily enough,” Kuritzkes says, “I did an interview a couple days ago with the guy who wrote that New York Times article.”

5. Does the Stanford cafeteria serve churros?

“I have no idea,” he says, “but it was always churros.” Every version of the script had Art and Patrick sharing a churro in the Stanford cafeteria, but Kuritzkes says the extra charge of homoeroticism came from the way Guadagnino shot the scene.

“The blocking of the churros developed over the process of making the movie,” he says, about the scene in which we see Patrick feed Art a churro at one point. “The presence of the churros in the scene is certainly amplified by what the actors and what Luca are doing.”

Why churros? “It’s California,” the Golden State-born screenwriter says. “I wouldn’t put it past them.”

6. Patrick has his Tinder set to men and women—is it because he dates both or because he’s looking for a place to sleep? What other apps is Patrick on?

“I think that it's an interesting thing for the audience to mull over,” Kuritzkes says, about the first question. “I think it's an intentional ambiguity there of, he needs a place to sleep that night, but also his Tinder settings are set the way they're set. I think the audience should piece that together for themselves and do what they want with it. I don't think Patrick is particularly interested in any of the people he's swiping on.”

And what other apps might Patrick be on? “I feel like he probably has a lot of apps for deals or coupons—that kind of stuff,” Kuritzkes says. “He has a car, so he's not doing Uber Pools or anything like that, but I bet he has a lot of apps for discount meals.” (My own guess: Grindr, and definitely Sniffies.)

7. Does Challengers have a villain?

During the movie’s press tour, Zendaya, O’Connor and Faist have gone back and forth on the film’s real villain. One theory? It’s actually Art since he’s arguably the reason for Tashi’s injury. As Kuritzkes sees it, though, there’s no villain in the story.

“I don't think about characters as being villains,” he says. “You're trying to create people that feel real, and what that ends up meaning is that you create people who are as cruel and petty and kind and understanding and generous and mean as the people you meet in real life. One of the things that I find interesting about tennis as a sport—and something that I think resonates in the lives of these characters—is that you're all alone on the court. To some extent, you're responsible for everything that happens to you out there.”

He relates that to the difference between tennis and boxing. “In boxing, you're trying to hit each other, and in tennis, you're trying to not hit each other,” he says. “You're trying to miss each other. In boxing, if you get injured, it's because somebody punched you in the face. Maybe you can blame yourself. You didn't block it, but somebody is responsible for what happened to you. In tennis, if you get injured, it's almost always because you got tripped, so it's almost always the case that you did it to yourself.”

8. How involved was Kuritzkes during shooting?

Often, in moviemaking, the contributions of the primary screenwriter end when production begins—film is a director’s medium, after all. According to Kuritzkes though, Guadagnino and his producers insisted that he be part of the whole process. “If anything needed to be reworked, it was going to be me doing it with, in deep conversation with all of the people I was now making this movie with,” he says. That allowed Kuritzkes to stay close to Challengers and to have a first hand account of how many decisions were made on set.

His funniest memory? For the scene where Art and Patrick first meet Tashi at the party, he wrote intentionally lame dialogue for the boys to say, that was meant to be “cute.” In practice though, the lame dialogue was too lame for Zendaya. “If somebody said that to me, that would be the end of the conversation,” he recalls her saying. Kuritzkes had to come up with more charming lines in five minutes, as the crew set up the camera. “The whole time I was sitting in my chair trying to come up with it, Zendaya was hovering over me, snapping her fingers and going, ‘Come on, cool guy. Come up with some cool lines.’ She was doing it very lovingly, I had nothing but affection for her at that moment, but it was the only time in the process when I said to her, ‘Would you go the fuck away?’” Kurtizkes recalls, laughing.

9. Finally: Luca Guadagnino thinks that after the end of the movie, the trio went back to the hotel room together. Does Kuritzkes agree?

“I don't care [where they go],” Kuritzes says. “I think, for me, what I'm interested in is that by the end of the movie, they're all really playing tennis and they're playing the best tennis of their lives, everybody and all their cards are out on the table. There's nothing left for them to say to each other at that point. They're having the most open and honest conversation of their lives, and they're doing it through tennis, so what happens after that? I think that's for the audience to think about. For me, I've gotten what I need from the movie at that point.”

Originally Appeared on GQ