‘Bottoms,’ a Horny, Queer ‘Fight Club,’ Is the Comedy Movie of the Summer
The opening scene of Bottoms sees a pair of high school best friends getting ready together for the first big social event of their senior year — the “carnival” — horny as hell and fantasizing about finally hooking up with their crushes. It’s a classic teen-movie setup, the kind we’ve seen from the hallowed John Hughes era to the late-Nineties boom of films like American Pie and Can’t Hardly Wait. But immediately, we realize this movie is serving up something different. The outcast besties are PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), and the classmates they’re lusting over aren’t the school’s football stars — they’re the cheerleaders. The minute the girls get into the carnival, PJ tries spitting some game at Brittany (Kaia Gerber), but instead of laying on the charm, she chokes. Thus is born a new twist on an archetype: the desperate, dorky queer virgin.
It shouldn’t feel so novel to see queer women centered as horndog losers. But that’s a wrong director Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby), who co-wrote Bottoms with Sennott, was looking to right. “I just wanted to have relatable queer characters onscreen,” says Seligman, who is gay. “We’ve made so many strides in queer representation, but I’m excited to see more, especially teen queer characters that have sex drives and are horny and flawed and not just these innocent beings that are either being traumatized or having the most sweet, PG love story.”
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PJ and Josie have flaws aplenty, and their traumas are mercifully limited to standard high school humiliations. After a dust-up with the star quarterback, the duo petition the school to let them start a self-defense club for girls, based on a lie that they became expert fighters while in juvenile hall over the summer. Their real goal: Use the club to get close to their crushes and finally get laid. From there, the action ratchets up, with hilarious set pieces featuring the girls kicking the shit out of each other, an exploding car, and a genius comedic turn by ex-NFL player Marshawn Lynch, a.k.a. Beast Mode, as a clueless history teacher. The movie won raves at the SXSW Film Festival in March, and it will open in limited release Aug. 25.
Back in April 2017, Seligman and Sennott had just finished shooting the short Shiva Baby — which three years later would morph into Seligman’s critical-darling feature debut — and were dying to work with each other again. (Seligman was drawn to Sennott’s sense of humor and ambition, calling her “such a Virgo.”) Seligman had a lone, loose idea in her head: “It was just a teen-sex comedy, but for queer girls, and they’re fighting or they’re heroes or something, but I don’t know what it is.” Sennott was down for a raunchy female comedy. So, while Seligman worked on the feature-length Shiva Baby, the pair began slowly plotting out what would become Bottoms. “We worked on this big whiteboard and just put all these things up there, and one of them was Fight Club,” Sennott says. “Another thing was [a] bomb.” She adds with a laugh, “So, just little girly things.”
Seligman knew immediately that Sennott, who starred in Shiva Baby as the titular character Danielle, a young bisexual Jewish woman who pays her bills as a sugar baby while trying to figure out her mess of a life, would nail the outgoing, ridiculous, and sometimes cruel PJ. And Sennott was up for the challenge. “I was excited to play PJ because I feel like it’s difficult to like her,” she explains. “She’s pretty mean and a tough cookie to crack.”
As for the quieter and more introspective Josie — the character Sennott calls “the heart of the film” — the writing partners felt from the start that Sennott’s frequent collaborator Edebiri was the only choice. All three women had attended New York University at the same time, and Seligman says from her first encounter with Edebiri, she had an inkling that she could play the character: “I met her at an NYU salon,” Seligman says of the actor, a breakout star of last year’s smash-hit series The Bear who’s also voiced Missy on the animated show Big Mouth. “She made a Downton Abbey joke that bombed, and no one laughed but me. She was just so awkward and weird and adorable, and I had a thought in my mind, ‘If I ever made that high school thing, that’s Josie.’”
Her gut proved right. Once Edebiri signed on and began consulting on the script, Seligman says, Josie began to really jump off the page. The character grows over the course of the film to become less passive and more willing to challenge her childhood bestie as the girls develop warring thoughts on the fight club — friction that lends itself to some of the movie’s best comedy. “[It was exciting] getting to do something where there’s a co-dependence,” Edebiri says. “And that is such a sticky age, where you are experiencing a lot of internal changes that you don’t have the language for, especially when there’s somebody you’ve known for what feels like your whole life, and there’s things that you just won’t talk about, or you don’t talk about, that can make things more explosive.”
The film was shot in April 2022 in New Orleans. Seligman’s first studio film, it was a wildly different experience from making her indie Shiva Baby. There was a crew of more than 200, action set pieces, stunts. Seligman choreographed the fights along with her director of photography, Maria Rusche, and the cast was put through a fight-club boot camp led by stunt coordinator Deven MacNair. “The first day of training with Deven, it was all the actresses in a room, and we just all started pushing each other on the mat,” Sennott says. “And I was like, ‘I can’t believe the script that we wrote is happening.’” The New Orleans climate brought biblical locust swarms and thunderstorms that helped make for a memorable shoot — as did Lynch’s lessons on how to throw a spiral during downtime on set. Postproduction, Seligman brought in Charli XCX, whose “sexy and innovative” music they’d listened to while writing the film, to do the score and soundtrack.
In the finished product, the seed of what Seligman and Sennott imagined six years ago grew into exactly what they’ve longed to see onscreen: queer women who are shitty and awkward and weird — or, in other words, real people. “That was really important to me and Emma,” Sennott says, “letting female characters and queer characters be kind of the worst. I mean, I love [PJ and Josie], I think they’re the best, but they’re also so annoying.”
Ultimately, of course, they knew none of it would work unless the comedy grabbed the audience and didn’t let go. “It [was] important to us [to be] making a movie that’s centering young queer women of different interests and different identities,” Edebiri explains. “But also, let us be here and laugh at us and laugh with us. That’s the main priority, is laughter.” Put another way, she says, “it’s a political act to be stupid.”
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