Tegan and Sara Quin, director Clea DuVall, and others behind the Amazon Freevee series High School discuss the show in a new video, exclusive to The Advocate.
The series stars twin sisters Railey and Seazynn Gilliland as, respectively, twin sisters Tegan and Sara, navigating their sibling relationship, romances, coming out, and becoming musicians in high school in the 1990s. The show, adapted from Tegan and Sara's 2019 memoir High School, premiered last Friday.
"High School is about young women who are queer and sort of struggling to figure out who they are and where they fit in the world," Tegan Quin says in the video.
The sisters "are very divided" when we first meet them in the series, DuVall says, with Tegan wanting a close relationship and Sara pulling away. "It isn't until they discover music that they really connect."
DuVall had read the manuscript of Tegan and Sara's memoir in one day and was eager to make it into a series. "I called Tegan the next day, and I was like 'Listen, your book is incredible! I loved it so much. Don't just give the rights to it to just anyone, like, let me adapt it. That way, you guys can be involved and ... it gives you guys like a little more control over how your story is portrayed,'" DuVall recently told The Advocate's sibling website PRIDE.
"I really connected with their story ... I had never read anything like that or seen anything like that before -- anything that really felt like my coming of age," DuVall added. "As queer kids in the '90s, you kind of fit yourself into stories that are not really for you, but you are just sort of grasping at anyone."
There weren't queer stories being told, and it wasn't easy being a queer teen, Tegan says in the video. "Today we come off like role models and mentors, but we did not come out like this -- into the world or into sexuality or anything like this," she says. "We struggled, just like every young person does."
"Now is the time for this story, because, I think, it is long overdue," DuVall says.
