🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
What’s in a soulmate? As the regal headmaster of Rosehill Country Day, Sarah Michelle Gellar, tells Tudum, “It’s when you can truly be yourself with another person.”
In Do Revenge, former It Girl Drea Torres (Camila Mendes) and awkward newbie Eleanor Levetan (Maya Hawke) become kindred spirits when they team up to take down each other’s tormentors at their pastel-soaked private school: Drea’s fake-woke ex Max Broussard (Austin Abrams), who leaked her sex tape, and Eleanor’s crush from camp Carissa (Ava Capri), who mocked her as a “lesbian leper” after Eleanor came out to her.
In order for the audience to cheer on the twosome channeling their utmost Glennergy (Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction energy), the chemistry between the actors needed to be palpable, on-screen and off. That especially rings true once Eleanor’s real bully is revealed to be none other than Drea herself, and we suddenly realize Eleanor’s been “doing revenge” on her the whole time. After all, as Eleanor learns from Drea: “Narcissists are too busy thinking about themselves to realize they’re being played…”
Luckily for director-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, she intuitively felt in her bones that Mendes and Hawke were her leading agents of vengeance when she first met them. “They’re not [playing] Drea and Eleanor, but they really are Drea and Eleanor,” she says.
“It’s not necessarily that they immediately presented as these characters, but the deeper we got into it, the more it was just like, ‘Oh, I don’t know where Drea ends and Cami begins,’ and ‘I don’t know where Eleanor ends and Maya begins,’ and it was really awesome. It was such a special experience.”
The dynamic trio have stayed tight-knit, and not just via the Revengers group chat with the rest of the cast. “We’ve all gotten really close,” Hawke tells Tudum. “It was a really intense period of time. We all really had to be there for each other, and now we’re friends. That’s how you make friends, you know? You make your friends at work.”
The biting teen comedy was shot last summer from June to August 2021, exactly as Hawke was also in the midst of filming Stranger Things Season 4. Despite the back-and-forth, Hawke says filming simultaneous projects was more than worth it (plus the Revenge set had ample beanbags for essential napping) since she doesn’t know an actor who wouldn’t want to play a character “this dimensional and with that beautiful and well-drawn an arc” as Eleanor. Plus, “everyone wants [Eleanor’s pet bearded dragon] Oscar Winner Olivia Colman.”
Robinson commends Hawke’s “true artistry” and thirst for creating such a fully lived-in life within Eleanor. “She came to Eleanor with so many ideas,” she says. “It was so fun to be able to be there to watch Maya’s brain work and just be her brain guide because, really, I don’t feel like I had to do much directing. I really just had to sit back and let her spin her wheels and create and just give her the space to feel safe to do that.”
Hawke’s fondest memory from the set is one of the final shots of the film and serves as a testament to the bond she and Mendes, who Robinson deems “a total movie star,” crafted: “It was Cami’s last scene, when we hugged on the beach and jumped into the ocean on our last week of shooting in Miami.”
The memorable, euphoric moment takes place after Drea and Eleanor both realize they’re happier being friends than hurting each other. All the masks have fallen away and they’re just left with the rawest versions of themselves: two “fucked-up soulmates” basking in the glow of finding someone who accepts and respects them as they are.
Hawke jokes that “I don’t think we’re nearly as fucked up as our characters. I mean, God forsake, I hope not. But I think we’re definitely soulmates.”
Do Revenge is now streaming on Netflix.
