Mike Faist does not really believe he has control, or power, over his career—or that many actors do. It’s not magic or destiny per se, but there was a sense on Challengers that everybody was where they were meant to be. Within the movie, inside the hot, sweaty and hurtful love triangle between teen doubles champs Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and rising tennis superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), it’s not such a different thing. They are bound by ambition and desire—because love literally means nothing in tennis, right?

Tashi, Art and Patrick ping pong in and out of one another’s lives for more than a decade. In their youth, Tashi and Patrick date; later, a court injury thwarts Tashi’s tennis career and Patrick’s temper ruins their relationship; even later than that, Tashi and Art are married, and she’s his tennis coach. Everything is just swell, until the three athletes realize none of them are happy on their own—but when Patrick and Art go head-to-head for the first time in years, Tashi the only person not following the ball from the stands, it doesn’t feel like anyone could possibly win with one another either. Yet, like Faist says, they’ve got no choice but to keep playing the game.

“I truly believe that projects find us more than we go after them,” Faist tells me in London, speaking to his co-lead role in Challengers as much as the one that got away in Past Lives. That recent entry into the Letterboxd One Million Watched Club depicts another love triangle, written and directed by Celine Song… who is married to Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. Faist didn’t know this until meeting Kuritzkes halfway through production, at which point he had to tell him how much he adored Song’s script. He read for it, didn’t get it, but never forgot it.

Faist, who typically dislikes reading scripts, felt the urge to write to Song’s agent during the Covid lockdown to wish her well on Past Lives, whether he was involved or not. “I had to be like, ‘Listen, I don’t read things, but [this script] was amazing. I really feel for you and I hope you’re okay. I’m such a fan,’” he recalls. “Cut to Challengers, I’m getting to know Justin and he mentions his wife, so I had to tell him the whole story. It was this very interesting, meta thing. It was meant to be, in some capacity.”

Challengers never hides its game: follow the lovesick boys like you follow the ball; never trust a serve as an invitation; believe that the grunts, screams, cries and sighs you hear in the middle of a match are, when you close your eyes, exactly what they seem (backhand, receiver, drop shot, forehand, stroke… what were we talking about?). The cast won’t comment on whether Art and Patrick are queer, even if they trip and fall onto each other’s lips while going after the same girl. A game’s a game. (Although Sarah does succinctly sum up the movie: “Blood, sweat and tears? More like betrayal, sweat and queers!”)

More than a competition, the actors’ prep process was about working in tandem, sharing in the journey of getting in shape and getting to know one another in a luxurious six-week rehearsal and training period in Boston. “It was a privilege to really dig into it,” Zendaya recalls, describing the rare stretch of time that these three stars could, well, play together. “I got lucky that they’re both lovely guys, kind and generous with their work and time. It created more of a safety,” she says, the inverse of Tashi’s mentality.

“Tashi goes about her confidence a little bit differently than I would suggest,” Zendaya says at the London premiere. “[The film] deals with themes of codependency—her life is so dependent on using other people that when she’s alone, she doesn’t know what to do. She’s not happy.” Tashi, despite spending the decade-plus that Challengers covers playing with her “little white boys”, is not in this for the team work. “Decimate that little bitch,” she purrs to Art in a prime example of the only kind of guidance she has, before he crashes out of the competition that begrudgingly leads him back to Patrick Zweig. Art, curled up like a soft little cat in Tashi’s lap, just wants the love she’s never been prepared to give.

“Their souls are tied to each other,” O’Connor tells me, “but it comes and goes in waves, and they’re pulling and tugging against each other. It’s messy, like a lot of relationships are, and like life is.” He would say that, as Patrick later smirks to Tashi, both adults and caustic ex-lovers: “I have never been confused that I’m a piece of shit.” There goes the smash.

Kuritzkes believes that love triangles have been a part of storytelling, not just movies, forever for good reason. “It’s an inherently unstable shape,” the screenwriter reflects. “Even a totally equilateral triangle is a menacing shape—it’s a spear, it cuts you.” Throughout the last few months, Kuritzkes has explained that Guadagnino’s guiding principle was for “all corners of the triangle to touch” at all times. “I’m drawn to the love triangle in Challengers because if you change the relationship between any two points in the triangle, the other one has to move, too. The distance between two of them shrinks,” Kuritzkes continues. “There’s so much drama in that—it’s an inherently dynamic thing.”

What we know they did watch is one of O’Connor’s favorite movies, Ratatouille (to which Zendaya just replies “cinema”), during the “summer camp” period of getting to know one another. I ask for movies that Faist and Zendaya may have shared—or wanted to share—in exchange for O’Connor’s number one. None come to mind, and Faist instantly sees through my Tashi mind games to get any kind of favorites out in the open. “Here’s their way of doing [four favorites]—we’re not going to do it! You sneaky, sneaky devil!” So, cards close to the chest, he just nods and smiles at my tee, confirming: “Another love triangle.”

After the fact, Faist does name Alfonso Cuarón’s gloriously horny odyssey when asked at another premiere for other love triangle touchstones, alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers from 2003 as one he personally brought to the table. On the same night, O’Connor admits that while in London, he was asked about on-screen love triangles and failed to do his own self-imposed homework for the next time that he’d have to think about movies. “Wait, what was your t-shirt?” was, in fact, the exact wording between O’Connor and the Letterboxd team at the London premiere. “Yes, your t-shirt. Watch Y Tu Mamá También after Challengers.” Is that a deuce?

Meanwhile, Kuritzkes tells us that he and Guadagnino bonded over a different director, Mike Nichols, in their collaboration. “[Nichols’] movies really mean a lot to [both of us],” the writer says. “The first one he and I talked about in relation to Challengers was Carnal Knowledge—that would probably be a really sexy double bill.” The actors agree that Guadagnino’s sensitivity to human behavior is the director’s greatest skill on set, too. “His main focus is character, and he’s one of few directors to go into that world—it’s always the dynamics of accepting the faults and finding the redemption or nuance in them,” says O’Connor, who is currently in talks to reunite with Guadagnino on gay romance Separate Rooms.

Zendaya concurs on her director and producing collaborator’s impeccable eye. “Luca has incredible taste. He has these instincts. You’ll be in a scene and he’ll be like, ‘Drop your head, I want to try something.’ And then you do it and it’s brilliant, and it’s like, why didn’t I think of that? He has an ease with how he understands people, and listens to what you’re saying.”

But back to Ratatouille. O’Connor knows it’s a joke at this point—to him, but actually nobody else—as our interview ends with him teasing me “that’s the message of Challengers, just watch Ratatouille.” Yet Zendaya knows it was actually the right story to help these actors take care of themselves in one another’s company while finding the bitterness they needed on screen. “[Watching] Ratatouille was lovely, because these characters are extremely intense, you’re shooting a Luca Guadagnino film, the idea of it feels very serious and daunting,” she says. “It’s just nice to watch Ratatouille. Don’t take it too seriously.” In Challengers, that may well be the only rule.