Game, Set, Match... Love? 'Challengers' Screenwriter Opens Up about the Gay Subtext of Tennis

"Challengers" scribe Justin Kuritzkes opened up about how the gay aspects of tennis helped him formulate a movie about passion, competition, and homoerotic desire.

"Tennis, by its nature, is a very erotic sport," Kuritzkes told Variety.

Contrasting tennis to boxing – "where you're all alone, and you're trying to spend the whole match touching another person" – the screenwriter added, "Tennis is about being all alone, and being at a distance from somebody, and trying not to touch them."

"There's a deep intimacy and a deep eroticism in that, and also a lot of repression. It's a very repressed sport, because again, the point is no contact. The point is to just miss the other person. To me, that's almost like a Victorian romance. It's very sexy," Kuritzkes said.

"So tennis, of its nature, is erotic," Kuritzkes said, "and you usually play tennis against somebody of the same gender. So tennis, by its nature, then becomes almost homoerotic."

This being a movie about male sports rivals who are also both attracted to the same woman, that strain of same-sex attraction "has always been a part of Art and Patrick's friendship, as it is, frankly, a part of every friendship," the novelist and playwright explained about the submerged sparks between characters played by Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor, respectively.

"But there is something that's unlocked once Tashi" – Zendaya's character – "enters the picture, where the desire is flowing in all directions in ways that are confusing for everybody."

The tension is social as well as sexual. Noting that "all the corners of the love triangle touch," Kuritzkes said that "Where they all are in the social order informs the way that they relate to each other within the triangle."

"Art and Tashi might have things in common that they don't have in common with Patrick, and Art and Patrick certainly have things in common that they don't have in common with Tashi, and Tashi and Patrick, in a way, have things in common that they don't have in common with Art."

"That has everything to do with them being at these three different points in the American system," Kuritzkes said.

Though not particularly a fan of the sport before he wrote the screenplay – his first – Kuritzkes expalined how inspiration for the story came to him as he watched the U.S. Open in 2018 – a match during which tennis great Serena Williams was penalized for supposedly "receiving coaching from the sidelines."

"Immediately, it struck me as really cinematic, that you're all alone on the court, that there's only one other person who cares as much about what happens to you in this match as you do, and you can't talk to them," Kuritzkes recalled.

"I started to think, 'What if you really had to talk about something important that went beyond tennis? Beyond sports? Something that was going on with you guys personally? How would you have that conversation? And how could you communicate the tension of that situation silently using the language of film?'"

That, too, is an innately LGBTQ+ subject, and there might be no better choices than "God's Own Country" star Josh O'Connor and the guy who played "Riff" in "West Side Story" to play the male leads, with "Euphoria" breakout star Zendaya as the third point on that love triangle.

Watch the preview for "Challengers" below.