Actor Clea DuVall wasn’t familiar with Tegan and Sara Quin’s music until she joined some friends to see the duo perform. They moved in similar circles and, as DuVall eventually took an interest in directing, she started off with promotional videos for the Quins’ “Heartthrob” record, which was released in 2013. Since then, the trio have collaborated on a number of projects, including an on-screen adaptation of the Quins’ 2019 memoir High School.
DuVall was captivated by how the twins captured what coming out in the ‘90s was like. “It mirrored my experience so much,” the actor/director said in an interview with Variety. “Even though I was a woman in my 40s reading the book, feeling seen at the time – who I was at the time, it was just so powerful.”
After the Quins jumped on board with the television adaptation, the show was sold to Amazon Freevee (then IMDb TV). Laura Kittrell joined as co-showrunner, with DuVall, and the pair wrote the eight-episode season.
The Quin twins worked closely with DuVall and Kittrell. The showrunners would “send them outlines,” DuVall says, “and then they would let us know what they were OK with, or not OK with, in those. We would write the scripts, they would read the scripts, and again, sign off on those as well.”
Tegan and Sara were most concerned with accuracy. DuVall recalls the twins saying “Oh, that would have never happened,” and nixing a couple of things they didn’t want to be in the show. “If it was important to the story, we would have bigger conversations, and usually end up compromising,” DuVall says.
“We never wanted to do anything that they were like, “We hate that. We won’t feel good about that in the show.” But there were certain times that something needed to happen in order to move the story forward. So then it was just about having a conversation and finding a happy medium where they didn’t feel like it was so far from reality. “
DuVall took on a challenging task when she became inspired to direct the series. It’s a biographical television show about identical twins, played by first-time actors Railey and Seazynn Gilliland. The way they were distinguished in visual cues, storylines, and personality became paramount.
“That’s part of why I wanted Sara to have the black eye,” DuVall says. “Having that immediate distinction in the first two episodes would be helpful as the audience was getting to know them as characters. But then I felt Tegan and Sara are so different from one another, and Railey and Seazynn are so different from one another — and the characters are so different — that I felt like after the first two people would get it.”
Knowing the Quin twins well helped DuVall distinguish them on screen. “I mean, Tegan has a lightness to her, and more of an innocence,” she says. “She’s so quick to smile, and she has a laugh that is surprising and infectious.
“Whereas Sara is a little more removed, she’s a little bit more of an observer who is less likely to put herself forward. She’s just a little more introspective, and a little more haunted. A little more aware of what’s going on with herself, and haunted by it more. Even her relationship with Maya, her friendship with Maya, I don’t think she’s even aware that those feelings are what they are. She asks herself less questions about what she’s feeling, whereas Sara is in a position where she has to be asking these questions because of her circumstances.”
As for a season two: “Freevee hasn’t said anything to us about when they’re deciding, or which way they’re leaning or anything like that. We don’t really know anything. The show will go on as long as there are stories within the book to tell. It will never go beyond the book.”
