Love at second sight? With Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game being adapted into a movie, the pressure is on when it comes to the chemistry between Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell.
Fans of the 2016 romance novel got a glimpse at the banter between office enemies Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman in the official trailer for the film.
“I’m trapped here, day after endless day with my one maniacal nemesis,” Hale’s character says in the November 2021 video.
During a comedic scene in the elevator, Lucy sets up the story line, telling Joshua, “If you get the job I’ll resign, just like you will if I do.” Her coworker responds, “I’m incapable of giving you that pleasure,” to which Lucy fires back, “It’s not the first time you’ve said that to a woman, is it?”
Ahead of The Hating Game’s film adaption, Thorne opened up about the process of creating such unique voices within the narrative.
“When I was writing The Hating Game my personal challenge was to write really snappy dialogue. In all my fizzled earlier manuscripts, I’d struggled with dialogue in a major way,” the author told Cassie Hamer during an interview for her website in March 2016. “I just focused really hard on getting it right and trying to keep that back and forth between Lucy and Joshua, like a game of ping pong.”
It was also very important for Thorne that the lead character jumped off the page.
“I knew that I wanted to write a heroine who was relatable, fun, weird and susceptible to getting caught up in her own head,” she detailed at the time. “Someone I’d like to be friends with. Her voice came fairly easily to me. It felt like I’d always carried her around with me and she was finally having her turn, speaking onto the page.”
Hale, for her part, explained the draw of filming a love story where viewers know what to expect.
“It was so fun. I loved the book and I love rom coms. There’s something nice about knowing what’s going to happen in the end,” the Pretty Little Liars alum detailed to Entertainment Weekly in September 2021. “There’s something really nice about watching a rom com because you know they’re going to find love and everything’s going to be fine. I did it with my friend Austin Stowell, and it was a blast. I haven’t seen it yet, but it felt great filming it. I know that the book has kind of like a cult following, so I’m sure they’re excited to see it.”
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