How Challengers Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes Went From Cult YouTube Star to Luca Guadagnino Collaborator

Photographs: Matthew Dunivan, Courtesy of MGM Studios. Collage: Keir Novesky

I catch Justin Kuritzkes, the screenwriter behind the new Luca Guadagnino film Challengers, in the middle of a busy press day, doing interviews from an elegantly-appointed hotel room that would be right out of a Guadagnino production (I Am Love, obviously) except for the room’s conked-out TV, which keeps inexplicably coming to life and playing The View. “They just want to be heard,” Kuritzkes cracks. “They want to give their views on everything.”

Kuritzkes lives in New York with his wife, Past Lives director Celine Song. Today he’s in Los Angeles; a few days before that, he was in London for the Challengers premiere, where he fielded press-line questions about his personal life with Song and the “giant buttons” on his shirt. Many years ago, long before he found himself sharing red carpet real estate with Zendaya and attending the Oscars with his wife, Kuritzkes published a novel called Famous People, written in the voice of a Bieberesque pop star grappling with life in the red hot center of the culture. The irony that Kuritzkes himself has now found himself in that center—a reality where he counts real-life superstars as friends and collaborators—is not lost on him. “That felt like an interesting preparation for this,” he says.

Arguably the season’s most hotly-anticipated movie, Challengers feels like a throwback to a Hollywood of yore, when unapologetically horny, thrillingly sweaty adult films were the center of culture and studios didn’t hedge bets on ran-through IP. (It would make a great future Erotic 2020s episode of You Must Remember This.)

The story follows the libidinous entanglements of three tennis stars—played by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist– from their beginnings as promising talents on the junior circuit through the cusp of retirement. Kuritzkes’ script keeps a lot of tennis balls in the air; it’s a sports movie that’s as much about sacrifice and unfulfilled potential as it is an erotic thriller about power and control.

The seed for Challengers was planted in Kuritzkes after watching the 2018 US Open Women’s singles final that saw the upstart Naomi Osaka defeat tennis icon Serena Williams in straight sets. During the match, he remembers Williams becoming visibly upset, after receiving a controversial penalty for allegedly receiving coaching from the sidelines.

“Immediately, that struck me as really cinematic,” he says. “You're all alone on the court, there's this one person in the stands who cares as much about what happens to you as you do, but you can't talk to them. And what if you guys had to talk about something really important and really dramatic beyond tennis, something about your lives, and something that included the person on the other side of a net? How would you have that conversation without breaking the rules? And so, the idea for the movie planted itself in my head in a very vague, sort of unformed way.”

The following year, when Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic faced each other at Wimbledon, Kuritzkes was struck by the way the camera kept cutting to Federer’s wife Mirka in the stands.“She looked so stressed out, every point,” he says. “I was watching her and just thinking, ‘Why are you so stressed out? You guys have all the money in the world. You've won 20 grand slams. What's so stressful to you? It has to be something else.’”

Later, Kuritzkes learned that Mirka had been a rising tennis star in her own right before a foot injury cut her career short. “She kind of became [Federer’s] manager, and sort of managed his life,” he says. “He credits her a lot for [his success].” That moment seems to have inspired aspects of Zendaya’s character Tashi—another rising tennis star who ends up living out her career through her husband, after she’s sidelined by an injury.

In sports, Kuritzkes sees an inherent theatricality. “Sports fans are drama queens,” he says. “Guys who would never be caught dead at the opera, who would never be caught dead at the theater, [they] get all of their dramatic energy from watching sports. As somebody who makes drama for a living, there's a sort of envy I have for the way that people react to sports... I would die to create something that made somebody want to break their television.”

There’s a thread of queerness—or at least a comfort with queerness—that runs through Kuritzkes’ work. (In 2016, he released Songs About My Wife, an album of pop music that often blurs the lines between earnestness and winking satire, and features a song called “I Slept With A Man.”) In Challengers, the homoerotic charge between Faist’s and O’Connor’s characters is fully explored—refreshing in a moment where queerbaiting still runs rampant.

“I think there's a lot of repression in the world in general, and especially sports,” he says. “Because sports competitively are usually played by people of the same gender, they're homoerotic. And it's sort of there, pretty nakedly on display whenever you watch sports.”

“I remember growing up, me and all my straight guy friends would watch WWE. And you're watching guys in underwear who are jacked up and have oiled themselves up so their muscles are glistening, they're wrestling each other. And the stadium is full of men—I’m sure most of them identify as straight—who are cheering them on. And so, you'd have to really try not to see the homoeroticism of sports.”

That tension between hetero masculinity and queerness famously runs through Guadagnino’s work as well. In that way, it’s not surprising that Kuritzkes and Guadagnino found each other. “We established a lot of trust and realized we spoke the same language really quickly,” he says. “I hope to work with him as often as I can.”

Later, when I tell him that Challengers reminds me of Carnal Knowledge, Mike Nichols’ savage 1971 classic about two friends navigating sex and relationships over a few decades, he grins. “Mike Nichols is one of the first directors that Luca and I bonded over after he had first read the script,” he says. “He had been saying forever that he wanted to make a movie like Mike Nichols. He wanted to get into that kind of a world before we knew each other, before he had read my script.” (In their version, of course, Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel would have some locker room fun of their own.)

It’s a heady moment for Kuritzkes. Prior to his sudden rise as a screenwriter, he was what you might call a millennial slasher—a talented storyteller who was a playwright by trade, worked on pop music on the side when he wasn’t working on a novel, but was better known for a robust YouTube channel (183,000 followers and counting) where he posted PhotoBooth-shot comedy skits in funny accents, the most viral of which was the immortal Potion Seller.

He was bitten by the creative bug early. Growing up, he became close to his mother’s brother Eric Manes, a writer-producer who worked on films like the Kurt Russell-Kevin Costner starrer 3000 Miles to Graceland and wrote the MTV series Fear. “It was like a competition show where you had to complete a number of tasks in these famously haunted spaces, abandoned hospitals or something,” Kuritzkes says. “It was all like Blair Witch Project-style body cams, basically. I remember being eight or nine years old, him screening the first episode for me and me being so totally terrified and thinking, ‘Wow, it's so cool that my uncle does that for a living.’”

By high school, he was writing one-act plays that other students would perform. “Once that sort of got its hook in me, it was hard to turn away from it.”

In a few years, Kuritzkes has been able to move from the clever but goofier achievements of his Potion Seller persona—in Nichols terms, his Nichols and May era—into serious and seriously buzzy filmmaking. Together he and Song make for an attractive power couple—which has brought with it some unwanted notoriety.

Last year, as Past Lives turned his wife into one of the era’s most exciting new filmmakers, interest around the couple grew on Film Twitter. Prodded by the personal nature of her film and imagined parallels between Past Lives’ inyeon-fueled triangle and Challengers’ comparatively-steamier three-way tangle, Kuritzkes and Song became the subject of speculation on Film Twitter that, while lighthearted, was often intrusive.

Wisely, Kuritzkes doesn’t engage with any of that chatter. “I think that's just part of the bargain of making stuff that's for the public,” he says. “Inevitably, people are going to have fun with you online. I think in a way, having a YouTube channel that went semi-viral for a decade has been a good preparation for that, because you quickly learn not to read the comments. Most of the comments on my YouTube videos were always nice, but every once in a while you'll get one that's just like, ‘Not funny. Die!’”

(For what its worth, GQ’s deputy site editor Chris Cohen, a college classmate of Kuritzkes, says: “[The husband in Past Lives] is way less cool than Justin. Like, I don't remember [Justin] being a headset gamer.”)

Anyway, Kuritzkes is quickly becoming too busy to read the comments. Up next is another Guadagnino film, Queer, an adaptation of the William S. Burroughs classic starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey. And after that? The sky’s the limit, it seems; a few weeks before the release of Challengers, it was announced that Kuritzkes was adapting Don Winslow’s bestselling novel City On Fire as a star vehicle for Austin Butler.

As he becomes one of Hollywood’s most in-demand screenwriters, it’s easy to see his rise from goofy YouTube sensation to scribe of prestige Hollywood projects as a kind of graduation. Kuritzkes, however, considers that earlier work as part of the same storytelling.

“I really just looked at it as another way to create characters,” he says. “Most of the people who knew me in the world knew me from Potion Seller. And I kind of liked that, because it felt like, Okay, well, whatever body of work you're trying to construct, forget about it. Just make stuff.”

Surely though, as he grows busier with superstars like Guadagnino and Butler, that’s the end of the Potion Seller? Not quite, Kuritzkes says: “I want to be like 70 and making those.”

Originally Appeared on GQ