Every rom-com heroine needs a great best friend, but not every rom-com heroine gets one. In Claire Scanlon’s “The Love Hypothesis,” based on Ali Hazelwood’s wildly popular romance novel of the same name, our leading lady Olive Smith (Lili Reinhart) really needs a bestie, and does she get a great one.
As Olive’s best friend Anh Pham, rising actress Rachel Marsh gets to take on a multi-faceted role, the kind we rarely see in these sorts of film. Anh, like Olive, is pursuing her PhD in Biology at Stanford (so she’s smart!). She’s also funny and warm and eager to bring Olive into the warm embrace of her family. But when Olive’s long-time crush Jeremy (Nicholas Duvernay) sets his sights on Anh, it seemingly threatens their loving bond. Or does it?
In both Hazelwood’s book and Scanlon’s film (adapted by Sarah Rothschild), what seems like the sort of BFF-busting complication audiences long ago grew tired of is turned on its head. Olive decides she’ll do literally anything to make her bestie feel comfortable pursuing their cute classmate, including fake dating brash professor Dr. Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman), who initially (ahem) seems like the last person on Earth who would a) go for the scheme and b) fall for Olive along the way. No spoilers here, but happy endings abound for all, including Olive and Anh and their best friend-ship.
Ahead, IndieWire chats with Marsh about her first film role, her own reading habits, the book’s extremely funny roots in fan fiction, romance, the rising affection for another Marsh joint, and what it feels like to get the kind of role that really does come along too often.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
IndieWire: The book has a huge existing pool of fans — readers, romance readers, Ali’s fans — and, for them, it’s a huge deal this movie has been made. What was your relationship with the book before the movie came around?
Rachel Marsh: I had not read it, but I had seen the cover, because I think everyone has! In bookstores, the airport, this title was ingrained in my mind, so when the time came when Claire sent me this audition, I was like, “Oh, I already know what that is.” I was excited because it was something that was already in people’s heads and I’d never been a part of something like that. It was such an honor to be a character that has already been in people’s heads.
It’s funny you say that, because then you are in something like “Fallout,” which is also in people’s heads in its own way.
Totally! “Fallout” is so fun and it’s so silly and stupid and also dramatic. We shoot on film! It’s such a dream to be in that show. I love it so much.
At what point did you read the book? Assuming you did, sometimes people tell me they didn’t.
No, that’s crazy. Why would you not read a book that you’re in?
If you had the material, why would you not want all of that material?
Right, just to know what people have in their head, so that when they’re watching you, [what] the difference that they’re going to be clocking [looks like].
I read it after I had booked the job, because I really loved the script that Sarah wrote. And, as an actor, sometimes you fall in love with projects and then you don’t book them and it’s almost like a heartbreak, almost like going through a breakup. I really didn’t want to go through the pain of reading a whole book about her if I didn’t book this role, so I waited. When Claire called me and told me I got the role, then I read it and it was so fun and special. I actually listened to the audiobook, because I like that better because I’m in my car a lot in LA.
At what point did you hear about its roots as fan fiction?
I think Claire told me that once I booked the job. She was like, “Let me tell you all the history of Ali and how incredible she is.” And how she actually wrote this based on fan fiction and that’s why people are kind of fancasting it. “So if you see on TikTok, that’s why there’s fan cast of it.”
It was really a download of background for me to understand coming to this project that it is something that is so important to people and something that people are going to be pretty judgmental of, for better or for worse. So far, fans of the book have accepted it and really loved it, so that’s been really encouraging. But yeah, isn’t that so funny? It’s almost like another layer of pressure for Lili and Tom, so I don’t envy them.
You mentioned that you listen to audiobooks a lot. What’s your reading diet like?
I just finished “FameSick.” I’m really into an audiobooks. If you have any recommendations, I’m admittedly not a big reader, my brain is broken and so I can’t focus. I read a lot of recipes. I love to cook. I’m kind of a hobby chef, so I’m on Bon Appetit all the time, New York Times recipes. I have a collection of cookbooks in my kitchen. I do love books! But cookbooks [are great] because my brain can only process two minutes at a time.
Well, with cookbooks, ideally then you’re cooking something, so you’re getting something else out of it, too.
Yes, exactly. Exactly!
With Ali’s book, and now with the film, we get an incredible best friendship that has many facets to it, the kind you don’t often see in stories like this. At what point when you were talking about the project, did you realize that Anh gets her own story, too?
Exactly what you’re saying, it’s so rare to get a character that is not a number one or number two on a call sheet that has their own arc that is important to the plot of the film. Props to Ali, she knows how to write women so well. She knew that at the core of a person — because the story centers around Olive — are the women around her as well. She thought that was important enough to bring into the spotlight this character of Anh to be the best friend, but not in a trope-y way, in a way that made sense to carry an important piece of Olive’s story.
I just got lucky with that, because I think acting is hard, you don’t get to choose what kind of role this person has in the film, you don’t get to collaborate on that level. I really know and trust Claire so much, we’ve worked together before, I knew that she would take really good care of Anh and take care of all the women in this film. Especially being an Asian woman and seeing so many tropes come out of film and television for us, I think that a lot of the women who are women of color watching this will be really excited to see this character portrayed in a way that’s featured.
For audiences who are knew to the story, I think they might expect something typical — they like the same guy! — but that’s not how that plays out.
It’s always like us fighting over a boy, right? Which in real life, every single time, it’s not worth it. There’s eight billion people in the world, especially for a boy! A lot of women already know that, and so Ali was like, “Yeah, I’m not even going to touch that. I’m just going to be like, ‘Great, they’re supporting each other.’”
Do you know about this sort of lingering belief that Gen-Z viewers don’t really like sex or romance on-screen? The film has a very big romantic scene with Lili and Tom.
Totally, and I don’t think that’s true. I just don’t think it’s true. I think people are sick of the way that it’s been repeatedly shown to us, I guess, in film and TV. But I think that’s why this movie and this book specifically has taken off. Any kind of sex scene written by a woman is what women are going to see themselves in, any kind of sex scene that has the female perspective.
And I think that, combined with Claire and Ali together, the edit, and our DP Matt Clark, everyone was so specific about that scene. Everyone was under a lot of pressure, in a really good way, and they worked multiple edits to get it right. I think everyone’s going to be really happy with that scene, because we did know that going into it, but we just were not listening to the negative noise of it and just wanted it to be good, whatever that meant.
You also get a very different, but very key scene with Tom later in the film. No spoilers, but Anh does what any good best friend would do. What was shooting that scene like?
Oh, my gosh, that scene was so funny, because people already kind of know from doing press with Tom, but he’s the silliest guy. He’s just a big clown, and taking him seriously was hilarious to me. We kept breaking all the time, and it’s so goofy to look in a mirror at someone and try to shoot something. We would just be looking at each other and saying the most awful things to each other and just being like, “I’m sorry, I can’t take you seriously.”
It was also hot as fuck that day. It was one of the hottest days in Montreal, so he was sweating really hard and I was trying not to sweat through my lab coat. But he’s such a delight, he’s so talented, he worked really hard, and I think it was just fun.
You also have to break out a lot of science jargon here. What was that like?
Oh, my God, it’s been so hard. [Laughs] I was in another show called “Unstable” where I played a scientist, and so we had scientists on set and they told us how to hold things and how to put the gloves on right and how to say something so it sounds like you’ve been saying it your whole life.
People, for some reason, love to see me as a scientist, but I don’t want it anymore. You can ask Claire. That was the hardest part for me, getting out those science terms or choreographing movement with blocking. So I respect it. I respect it even more! That’s what I learned is just being like, just to be in that room, just to be holding those items, I respect you. You know what? It’s not the worst typecast, there could be worse ones. But I think I’m like, “I’ve served my time as a scientist.”
You have a background in improv, how do you feel that translates to when you’re doing scripted work?
I feel like some films are like rom-coms and some scripts are com-roms, as I would say, a this is a rom-com, proper rom-com. My whole mission when I’m doing specifically dialogue that’s supposed to be funny and that’s supposed to make someone else laugh, I have the same kind of technique when it comes to stage work and doing improv and doing sketches on stage, which is, how do I make someone else break? That’s always my goal is to make my scene partner, make the director, make the DP or someone just break.
A lot of it is trying out stuff, and if you’re lucky enough to have a director that will let you do a take for you if they already got everything else they wanted, then that’s when your improv can shine and that’s when you can play around with it a little bit. We had that in Claire. She comes from “The Office,” she comes from editing, she really knows comedy forwards and back. It was really silly to get to try out things and be like, “Is this kind of funny?” We did so much stupid improv on set, and a fraction of it made sense for the film, but that’s where the art and science comes into it. You try things out and see if it fits within the world of what Claire envisioned, and some of it did.
Speaking of good reviews, “Adults” Season 2! People liked Season 1, but they seem to love Season 2.
I love that show, Season 1 I loved it, and Season 2, I love it, but it’s cool now that people are starting to watch it more. I just remember that conversation with Ben [Kronengold] and Rebecca [Shaw], where they’re like, “We want you to come back and we want you to do something crazy. We don’t know what that is yet, but we’re going to figure it out.” And then it ended up being her wanting to be a K-pop star! You don’t get that lucky very much in this industry to get to work with people who write to you.
I think Ben and Rebecca really wanted to do that because they’re so good at what they do. They’re like, “Let’s just play around in Season 2 and have some fun with these side characters,” in a way that I was really, really proud of.
This is your first film, you’ve got great TV work under your belt, as you look forward, what is something you really want to do you haven’t done yet?
I really want to do stage work. I really want to do a play. I really want to do more. I want to return to the stage in some way. And I want to do more drama! I love comedy, it’s my first love, and I love making people laugh, but I do have that desire to just dig into something that doesn’t give me the comfort of being a weird little person. I want to dig into something that makes me a little uncomfortable, and I think that would be a straight drama.
“The Love Hypothesis” is now streaming on Prime Video.
