Not Okayfollows Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutch), an aspiring writer at a NYC-based outlet called Depravity. She has no friends and no followers, and decides to change her life by faking a trip to Paris under the guise of a writer’s retreat. After posting a picture of herself at a famous landmark, the area is struck by a terrorist bombing.
Danni wakes up to the concern of her friends, family, and most importantly, social media influencer Colin (Dylan O’Brien). The new social media star becomes the buzz of everyone’s attention and is branded a “hero.” Unfortunately, the higher one climbs, the further they fall. The dark comedy was created by writer-director Quinn Shephard, most known for her Independent Spirit Award-winning debut featureBlame. Game Rant spoke with Shephard about her inspiration behindNot Okay, the casting of social media influencer Caroline Calloway, collaborating with lead actor and producer Zoey Deutch, Dylan O’Brien’s makeover, and more.
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Game Rant:Not Okayis a brilliant take on influencer culture. What inspired you to make the movie?
Quinn Shephard:I came up with the idea four years ago. That’s when I wrote the first draft of the script. It came to me out of nowhere, I’m pretty sure I was in the shower. I was in this place where I was researching internet culture for a lot of different projects. I was watching YouTube documentaries and reading articles from The Cut about cancel culture. This came to me as a gift from the internet, just some bizarre mashup of realities that I was witnessing.
It was peak Trump America, and we were dealing with so muchpolitical unrestand violence. Yet, every day I was on my phone reading celebrity gossip and influencer stories. Those things existed beside each other and had the same amount of media coverage. It felt like in order to talk about the internet and film, it would be about capturing that mashup. That’s where the idea for Danni’s predicament came from, I was blending the terrors of our reality today with the superficiality.
GR: You mentioned The Cut as one of your sources of inspiration. I was very surprised by the Caroline Calloway cameo. I was like, “This seems like such a niche corner of ‘very online’ people to tap into.” Can you talk to me about the process behind her cameo?
Shephard:From the beginning, Zoey [Deutch] and I knew there would becameos in the scriptbecause it felt like it would be a missed opportunity to not have them, especially when you have an online shaming support group. I remembered the week the Caroline Callaway article came out on The Cut, every girl in New York was talking about it. I was going to drinks with different friends that week, and she would always come up in conversation. It was also very interesting to me because I immediately felt sympathy for her when it happened. I do think there’s an irony to the fact that the same people who raise people up on the internet and make them famous are the people who delight in tearing them down. It strikes me as: If you don’t want people to act a certain way, maybe don’t raise those people up to fame.
I don’t know, I just think she was a girl who made some interesting choices, and then her friend wrote a story about it, and it went viral. I felt bad when it was happening. I didn’t feel like she necessarily deserved to be the “Most Hated Girl in America,” which I felt like she was that day or at least in New York. It made me very fascinated by this celebratory nature of watching women fall on the internet, and it was something that I was interested in as a topic and wanted to address. But also, I think Caroline is the queen of self-satire now. So, she was really open immediately when Zoey and I wrote to her and asked her if she wanted to do a cameo in the film.
I was like fingers crossed. When I met up with her to talk about doing the cameo, she gave me a lot of insight into what it actually feels like to be a virally hated person for a period of time. It was really intense, which I imagined it would be, but hearing someone—who you’re sitting and drinking a glass of rosé with—talk about receiving rape and death threats on the internet daily… This is not the solution to someone exhibiting privilege or making bad decisions or telling some lies. This is not the solution.
GR: That’s such a hard thing to deal with when it comes to internet culture because life is nothing but a series of choices, and it feels like famous people don’t get to make poor decisions, but the rest of us do. It’s just a different standard, as you said.
Shephard:Yeah. I also think Caroline represents exactly who Danni would want to be. Danni’s dream is to be an influencer-writer hybrid in New York. It’s perfect. It was the perfect comparison.
GR: You mentioned collaborating with Zoey when you reached out to Caroline. Can you talk about her role in the production process?
Shephard:Yeah, so Zoey is an EP on the film. She is definitely a hands-on and collaborative actor and producer. She’s great. We would be strategizing on FaceTime, like, going over the schedule together, talking about cameos, and she was cold DMing people for cameos. It was awesome. She had really strong opinions that were very aligned with mine when it came to wardrobe and all the creative decisions. I always knew that if I was spread thin and doing a million things, she would be looking at every single detail that went into choices like Danni’s phone case and wardrobe. It was both of our eyes on everything.
GR: That is incredible. Did you see the reviewer who tweeted about thePete Davidsonification of Dylan O’Brien?
Shephard:I definitely saw that quote. I was obsessed with it.
GR: I would love to hear more about how the rest of the cast came together, especially Dylan O’Brien and Mia Isaac.
Shephard:Mia is incredible. We found her through an audition tape, and she had just shotDon’t Make Me Go. She was in New Zealand when she did her audition. She was exactly as I pictured the character. She’s a phenomenal actress. It was so powerful. And Dylan was very down to bePete Davidsonified. He loves the full immersion of the research. He’s a very serious actor, but he’s also down to have a good time.
When we first met, he had already started doing research on influencer culture and Hype House guys, and TikTokers and YouTubers. He was adventurous in how he wanted to portray the character. I immediately was like, “Can we dye your hair?” and he agreed. Honestly, he had the same idea. We were texting after our first Zoom and sending each other photos. I was sending him photos of Pete Davidson, MGK, and Justin Bieber, and he was getting back being like, “Yes! This is exactly what I want to do.”
GR: What was your biggest risk when creating this movie?
Shephard:The topic alone was nerve wracking because I was trying to talk about two things that are incredibly charged. Being who I am and coming from my perspective, as a fairly privileged, young white woman, I do feel like I had a certain amount of responsibility to be critical of the things I could see in myself and the people around me, and to use my platform to talk about those, but to not step on toes and speak for things that were not my place to speak about. I was definitely nervous.
I often thought, “Am I going to get canceled for making this movie?” I want to be a provocative filmmaker and I do think that difficult topics are really important to talk about. But I was constantly asking people for feedback on the script, I worked with a trauma consultant, I talked to a lot of people because I really didn’t want to navigate those topics wrong.
GR: What would you like audiences to take away fromNot Okay?
Shephard:I would love for the film to send a message of both empathy and self reflection. I think there’s a desire to have a concrete answer on cancel culture and whether it’s right or wrong. I don’t think public shaming is necessarily the answer. But also, you have to be held accountable for your actions. I just hope that people take away, especially from the ending, that listening and reflecting on your own self, and trying to be a better person is probably the only good thing you can do when you make mistakes.
Not Okayis currently streaming on Hulu.
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