How would you describe the female roommates at Essex College? I wanted to show young women who come in with a really strong point of view. Kimberly [PaulineChalamet] wants to be a Supreme Court justice. Leighton [ReneéRapp] will be in [Phi Beta] Kappa. Whitney [AlyahChanelleScott] wants to go pro [soccer]. None of them are demure, standing in the shadows. They come in with real purpose, and one is to have a lot of sex. How much of the show is based on your real-life college experience at Dartmouth, where you drew a comic strip for the school newspaper? It’s not autobiographical. The campus magazine in this show is a mix of a lot of different inspired literary [publications] that these colleges take a lot of pride in, that are hard to get into and that attract a certain kind of people. Was your main goal in college to write for the humor magazine? One thing that I share with Bela, the character that AmritKaur plays, is my single-minded desire to become a comedy writer. I’ve had that urge since I was 16 years old. Do you feel like this is the spiritual sister to your Netflix series (with co-creator Lang Fisher) Never Have I Ever? I do think there are some similarities. I guess I’m more interested in young women and their horny exploits than I would have thought. One thing that a lot of my shows and projects have in common is young women who have big personalities and big ambitions. Did you keep diaries in high school and college from which you can now pull story ideas? No, I wish I had. Even to this day, I have no sense of self-reflection. That’s why [research] trips to colleges were incredibly useful because they triggered memories, and we also got to hear the experiences of now. We didn’t want to be one of those nostalgia shows where you hear [the rock band] Chumbawamba, and you’re like, “Is this 2001?” We really did want to make sure that we nailed it for 2021. What aspects of college life will The Sex Lives of College Girls incorporate? We want to really show it from every point of view. The fact that one character has some real socio-economic struggles there as somebody who has to do work-study—that’s really real. The fact that we bring up the specter of Title IX and sexual assault. It’s about their lives, falling in love, romantic, sexy. The campus is beautiful. Great outfits, fun parties, but then also there’s the other side of campus life, which was equally interesting to write about and felt really realistic. We wanted to capture both. How did you decide on the four women that you cast in these roles? Casting the show was one of the most challenging but also most fun parts of the show, because even though all of these actresses have done so much training and have so much experience, they didn’t have a ton of TV experience. So they were, in a lot of ways, new to us. The fact that they have good chemistry, I don’t know. I feel like we cast them and hoped that they would do well. I will say that each of them really informed the part. We’d already written the pilot and had an idea of the character, but when we got to see the actresses and what their strengths were, it really helped us embellish the roles. One thing that we did, they’re not from this very small pilot pool that live in L.A. None of these young women are based in L.A. Pauline would read from Paris. It’d be like 2 o’clock in the morning. Amrit was in Canada. Reneé was in New York. Alyah was in a lot of different places during the pandemic, but I found that like in Never Have I Ever, most of our actors did not come from the limited pool of people that you see in L.A. We wanted to cast this with a more international search. Are you anticipating hearing from actual institutes of higher learning about the show? Both [executive producer] JustinNoble and I have really great relationships with our alma maters, and we went to visit Dartmouth and Yale, because they both, in some ways, fit this East Coast story. They were both founded in the 1700s, and I’d like to think that they’re proud of us as alumni and know that we are going to take liberties. I can’t imagine that they don’t know the other things that I’ve written and worked on and what the tone of my material is. That said, I actually haven’t even thought about it; they could be upset with us. Next, The 13 Steamiest Movies on HBO Max Right Now
