The Challengers trio gets into the churros, hot dogs, and cigarettes

Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor break down the film's themes of consumption and desire for The A.V. Club

By Drew Gillis | April 26, 2024 | 1:00pm

Film Features Challengers

The Challengers trio gets into the churros, hot dogs, and cigarettes

Pre-churro Photo: Metro Goldwyn Meyer

“It’s funny,” Zendaya says early on in our conversation about Challengers, “because people keep saying that it’s romantic.” She scoffs. “I was like, I don’t know where the romance is here.”

She is right, but it’s understandable how people make the mistake. The new film from Luca Guadanigno, which opens wide on April 26, chronicles three young athletes as they hook up, betray, and battle each other on and off the tennis court. Power struggles, sex, sport, and, yes, even love are easy to find. Romance, not so much. “I think there is a deep love between them, I think it just manifests in the worst kinds of ways for a lot of different reasons,” Zendaya explains.

Most Popular

In Challengers, Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, Mike Faist’s Art Donaldson, and Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig meet as teenagers at a tennis tournament. Over the course of 131 minutes, their paths split and reconverge ad nauseam. There aren’t too many people in the world who center their lives around tennis, and those who do are likely destined to bump into and bounce off each other. “I think they’re all just people that used to play tennis with other people and now they’re playing tennis with a wall, with a machine,” Zendaya says of the aging characters. “They can’t do that—that’s not how the game works. They need each other to get that fire out of life that they’re just not getting on their own… There’s big voids that they’re trying to fill, in the most healthy or unhealthy ways.”

This void-filling manifests throughout Challengers as consumption: of booze, of cigarettes, of bagels and hot dogs and churros. In a scene that somehow went viral before most people had even had a chance to see the movie, Patrick and Art sit in a college dining hall, eating churros. Then they eat each other’s. There’s the obvious subtext here—a churro is what one might deem a phallic-shaped food (duh)—but as O’Connor and Faist tell it, it was a character moment that sprung out of six weeks of rehearsals and learning about each other’s characters.

“If we’re eating churros, I’m gonna eat much quicker than Art does,” O’Connor says. “Art’s gonna savor it, and he might not finish it. Patrick knows that, because he’s his best friend, and they know each other back to front, so Patrick’s gonna finish his, and of course I’m going to take his. That’s unquestionable to him.” Adds Faist, “Josh and I, we would go outside and walk around Boston and we would just run lines. And it got to the point pretty much where I think we just knew each other’s lines.”

We see this dynamic earlier in the film, too, when the guys are watching Tashi tear it up on the court. “Patrick and Art are walking through the grounds of the tennis court and I’m scoffing my hot dog, then I’m done with mine, so I want his,” O’Connor recalls. “That’s something about Patrick—he has to consume.”

To O’Connor’s point, Patrick is often the one behaving the unhealthiest: smoking and drinking, things that usually aren’t typical behaviors of professional athletes. But as the actor explains, it’s simply part of the lie Patrick is telling himself: “He has this image of not caring. The reality is he cares very deeply.”

One of the main differences between Tashi, Art, and Patrick is their socioeconomic backgrounds—Patrick being, at least at the film’s open, the most privileged and secure. There’s an “underlying” understanding that Patrick is going to be ultimately fine, O’Connor says. “I think that plays out with his smoking and his drinking, his eating—it’s sort of like rock n’ roll, I don’t care. But he does, he deeply cares.”

Challengers premieres in theaters on April 26