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One of the downright hilarious comedy films of the year so far is Bottoms, filmmaker Emma Seligman’s teen sex romp about a pair of lesbian high school pals, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who have never done the deed — and are desperate to. PJ and Josie have the hots for popular girls Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) respectively, and so, they decide to start an all-female fight club in an effort to get laid. Our film critic, David Fear, called it “the horniest, bloodiest high school movie of the 21st century.”
The film is co-written by Seligman and Sennott, who’d previously worked together on Seligman’s terrifyingly funny debut feature Shiva Baby, while Sennott and Edebiri have been making comedy together since NYU and created a series of skits together for Comedy Central during the pandemic.
“I think since they’ve worked together so many times, they can really anticipate what the other person is going to do when they’re improvising,” Seligman tells Rolling Stone. “It’s rare to work with such fantastic actors who are also hilarious comedians and talented writers, so they know how to get back to the point of the scene if they’re going off the rails with a long-running joke. They’re generous and helpful scene partners to each other and to the other actors.”
In the below scene, which you check out first at Rolling Stone, PJ and Josie have just struck out with their crushes at the state fair and feel like it’s never gonna happen for them. So, a spiraling Josie launches into a speech about how she’s now doomed to marry their gay male classmate Mathieu (Bruno Rose). The monologue takes a number of wild twists and turns, and really showcases Edebiri’s comedic gifts.
“Ayo improvised this entire speech,” explains Seligman. “There were a few takes where Rachel and Ayo adlibbed based off what was on the page. Originally, the dialogue in this scene was basically just a continuation of Josie and PJ talking about how fucked they were this year and how their goals of having sex were ruined after they just blew their one chance of talking to Isabel and Brittany at the fair. Ayo basically expressed this but to an even more dramatic degree by making it about her inevitable future with Matthieu.”
You can watch the scene here:
Bottoms is now playing in theaters nationwide and will expand to even more theaters on Sept. 8.
