The thing about reviving the romantic comedy, as so many movie stars and streamers and smaller studios have attempted to do in the last few years, is that before the genre stopped showing up in movie theaters with any regularity, it got stuck in a kind of glossy, overlit stasis, enacting its hoariest clichés like sacred rituals. There can be a great deal of pleasure in the genre’s familiar touchstones, but the best entries tend to offer some kind of unexpected realness amidst the tropes – glimmers of real love, even if the trappings are kinda fake. One of the chief virtues of Which Brings Me to You, a romantic comedy released in theaters January 19, starring Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff as two strangers who meet at a wedding and get to talking, is that it feels sincerely interested in excavating its characters’ romantic histories, and unconcerned with rom-com formula.
When I tell this to Hale and Wolff during a brief but delightful Zoom interview, their chemistry reacts instantly. I mention that it’s especially refreshing to see a romantic comedy where the characters aren’t supposed to butt heads immediately, so the characters (and the actors) don’t have to pretend to hate each other at first. Wolff jumps in to start a joke: “We didn’t have to pretend to hate each other because we—”
And Hale picks it right up, literally finishing his sentence: “…genuinely hate each other,” she deadpans.
Hale, who also executive-produced the movie alongside her co-star, continues: “Rom-coms, what usually works is the enemies-to-lovers trope.” She and director Peter Hutchings are surely familiar with this, having made The Hating Game, an unusually sprightly version of that type in 2021. “I liked that this didn’t have that,” she says of the new film. “They meet at the beginning of the movie, five pages in they’re hooking up, you can tell they really like each other, and they sort of relive their past.”
Those moments, where the characters step into each other’s flashbacks and dissect them on-screen, reminded me of some scenes from Annie Hall. I tell the stars this, pushing through my fear that either of them will flinch at the implied mention of a filmmaker who is understandably not the most admired these days (though Which Brings Me to You courts the comparison with its opening-credits font). But they both agree, and Wolff offers one more point of comparison: “Another connection to Annie Hall, and When Harry Met Sally…, is ‘It Had to Be You’ is in both of those.” It turns up in Which Brings Me to You, too.
This gives way to asking each star about their favorite romantic comedies – “I wrote a list!” Wolff cries triumphantly – and one of the aforementioned titles is major for Hale: “One of my favorite… not even rom-coms, but one of my favorite movies is When Harry Met Sally…, which I watched really late in life, only a couple of years ago. It’s arguably the best one. It’s so timeless. That’s a movie that will carry on.” Hale also mentions a love for Kate Hudson’s romantic comedies of the 2000s, before Wolff eagerly reads off the full list he shows me from his phone. He compiled it for this press day, anticipating questions that have so far, apparently, gone unasked. I promise that I’ll include as many of them as I can in my piece. So, deep breath, here are – give or take any recording hiccups – Nat Wolff’s romantic comedy canon:
“When Harry Met Sally, Groundhog Day, Heaven Can Wait, Moonstruck, Say Anything, Bringing Up Baby, Broadcast News, His Girl Friday, Harold and Maude, The Apartment, The Big Sick, Annie Hall, Sleepless in Seattle, Long Shot, Silver Linings Playbook, Love Actually, Jerry Maguire, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, What’s Up Doc?, Clueless, Lost in Translation, About Time, The Wedding Singer, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Notting Hill, The Philadelphia Story.”
He’s obviously pleased to have rattled them all off. The list-making will not be in vain.
His 25-plus titles are also, in rom-com fashion, a great invitation to banter, though he and Hale have already been bantering. They’re loose and open conversationalists for a couple of stars who have spent the day on Zoom selling a movie that rests entirely on their shoulders; the call began with them immediately talking about CDs when they glimpsed my shelves in the background (her first-ever CD: TLC’s CrazySexyCool; his: Eminem “but it was all bleeped”). Their enthusiasm and Wolff’s pantheon make me want to chat about the rom-com genre for another half an hour: Is Jerry Maguire really that romantic? Is Eternal Sunshine truly a comedy? Is Love Actually actually good? But we only have a few minutes left.
Hale asks me if I’ve seen all of Wolff’s choices; the only one I’m missing is Heaven Can Wait, which Wolff urges me to seek out: “I watched that before this movie because it has a lot of similarities to Which Brings Me to You. It has a magical-realism quality even though it follows the beats of a romance, and also Warren Beatty’s character is kind of a lovable ne’er-do-well” – something he feels applies to Will, his somewhat feckless New Yorker in the new film.
I recommend Sleeping with Other People, my favorite rom-com of the past decade or so. Wolff hasn’t seen it; Hale has. “I need to rewatch that. I remember [Alison Brie] is so good in that movie. It’s hard tonally to get it correct,” she says. I ask if she and Hutchings will make it a rom-com trilogy, and she’s enthusiastic: “I’m sure I will. I love Peter. I think that he’s so good at telling these types of stories. He’s such a sensitive, romantic man, and the passion he has for these types of movies is so wholesome.”
Hale also wants to work with Wolff again: “The sequel is called Which Brings Me to 2,” she says, deadpan again. (Later, I wonder if that’s in a bunch of other 10-minute mini-interviews or if the she came up with it on the spot.) It makes sense that they’d reunite; Hale and Wolff are good at this, sometimes to the point of overshadowing the more overwritten passages of their movie that strain for the humor that seems to come naturally to them IRL. (The real-lifers even have a built-in behind-the-scenes meet-cute anecdote from Hale: “I tweeted about Nat in 2014 – we had met that night, and he didn’t respond really in the way that I had hoped, and that was really sad.”) The best parts of Which Brings Me to You echo that unforced affection. It may not wind up on future top-25 lists, but Hale and Wolff do what any stars looking to revive the rom-com must: Make the fakeness feel real.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.