Warning: This article contains spoilers about the ending ofNot Okay.
Viewer discretion advised."
Same goes for her love interest, her coworker Colin (Dylan O’Brien).
Searchlight Pictures
Such is the complicated irony behindNot Okay.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where did you get the inspiration forNot Okay?
It was all mixed with political unrest and deep anxiety and resources for mental health.
Dylan O’Brien and Zoey Deutch in ‘Not Okay’.Nicole Rivelli/Searchlight Pictures
It’s genuinely not.
And that was very much the feeling that I wanted people to get from Danni.
Was that in your mind when you were making this movie?
Searchlight Pictures
This is so funny you are not the first person who said this.
I’ve never seenDear Evan Hansenin any form.
I am probably the least familiar person with musicals ever.
I actually had absolutely no idea that even existed when I started working on this.
People tended to understand inherently what the project was criticizing.
I feel like I can assume which demographic that might have been.
We would literally get notes that were like, “I couldn’t stand her.
Are we supposed to?”
So then they’re like, “I guess I didn’t like the movie.”
It says a lot that you literally had to spell that out for viewers.
We literally didn’t have to change a thing in the edit.
It was just putting those words on the front of the film, which is fascinating.
Every single project I develop, you get the “unlikable woman” note.
And it doesn’t even matter.
Is there a reason that a main character has to be good?
Because we definitely don’t hold male characters to that standard.
Danni and Colin are clearly unlikable characters.
How did you go about making sure that they weren’t caricatures or parodies of influencers and Gen Z?
I don’t think that Danni is ever operating from a malicious standpoint.
But I don’t think she’s a hateful person.
But to me he’s still a real person because he’s willfully ignorant to the extreme.
It’s like, any little glimmer of guilt or conscience that Danni has, Colin does not have.
And Colin definitely represents the worst of the internet that Danni so wants to be accepted by.
And both Zoey and Dylan were down to really go there and become those archetypes.
Did you envision that happening from the start?
We had a lot of jokes about it.
Part of me is just embracing it.
It was like, you have no idea!
You literally don’t know who she is.
That would be bad.
[Laughs] I’m way too online now.
At this point I feel like I know too much.
I had to become so immersed in it that you start to catch internet culture.
The amount of times that I’ve said “it’s giving” recently is ridiculous.
Why did you want to end the movie like that?
And Danni recognizes that for the very first time in her life.
What were some of the alternate endings?
In the alternate endings, Danni actually faced pretty brutal consequences.
Once that resolved, people were not craving any further resolution.
And that wasn’t ultimately the message we wanted to send.
Not Okayis now streaming on Hulu.
