Asteroid City: Why Maya Hawke & Rupert Friend's Onscreen Romance Is Unique

Your characters have an interesting relationship in the film. How do you think their dynamic mirrors or plays off of some of the other blossoming romances that occur throughout the story?

Maya Hawke: You have relationships that are ending in the real world.

Rupert Friend: Yeah.

Hawke: There's Scarlett and Jason's.

Friend: [There's] Jake's budding romance.

Hawke: That one goes the best, I think.

Friend: That at least they get to kiss.

Hawke: They get to kiss.

Friend: Which is pretty great.

Hawke: I guess ... Ours has a flourish of optimism in it a little more like the kids, but with this guardedness of a grownup. We have [these] grownup walls up, or at least June does, and there's an impossible romance where we come from such different places when quarantine lifts. Who knows how we could make it work?

Friend: Which is really cool. One of the things that runs through the film is the idea of people from completely disparate worlds, literally in some cases, and what happens when they're thrown together and forced to get along for however long. It's a very different way of thinking about it than, "So and so lives near me," or is basically the easy thing. It's the [idea of] "What if you take the two opposites and throw them together and see what happens?"