COVER: Tegan & Sara, Clea DuVall, & Railey & Seazynn On High School

| 10/05/22

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COVER: Tegan & Sara, Clea DuVall, & Railey & Seazynn On High School

For more than two decades, indie pop stars Tegan and Sara Quin have crafted an air and mystique as the epitome of effortlessly cool.

But it turns out, even the ultra-hip artists behind hits like “Walking With a Ghost,” “Closer,” and “Everything is Awesome” were once awkward teens navigating friendships, first loves, and broken hearts, too.

Just like the rest of us, the Quins struggled through the challenges and joys of the discovery of their identities — in their case as twins, individuals, and queer women. This makes their stories both simultaneously unique to Tegan and Sara, but also instantly recognizable to any queer kid growing up in the ’90s. The musicians opened up about those experiences in their 2019 memoir High School, a story that has now been adapted to TV and premieres this month on Freevee. Helmed by director and queer icon Clea DuVall (But I'm a Cheerleader, The Happiest Season), it stars newcomersRailey and Seazynn Gilliland as Tegan and Sara, respectively.

The series, like the memoir before it, focuses on Tegan and Sara in their teens growing up in Calgary, Canada, and discovering a shared passion for music. It’s a complicated time in anyone’s life, and was made more so for the sisters because they were each searching for their own individuality, trying to break free of the notion that as twins they were a single entity. But that’s not all, Tegan and Sara were also embarking on their first romances and coming out as queer.

Both in the book and the series, all of this internal turmoil is set against the backdrop of ’90s culture complete with grunge, raves, and one of the greatest musical soundtracks of all time (the show kicks off with Hole’s “She Walks on Me” and the hits just keep coming). High School weaves in various perspectives including that of the girls’ parents and friends. It paints a picture of a very specific time. It also tells a universal story of confronting those confusing, painful, and exquisitely beautiful adolescent years.

Clea DuVall Enrolls in the High School Adaptation

How the project came about, it turns out, was quintessentially Tegan and Sara. They had just finished the manuscript for the memoir and Sara was focused on mentally preparing for the book’s release. So, she was very surprised to get a call from Tegan, who casually dropped that DuVall said she’d stayed up all night reading the memoir, loved it, and was ready to adapt it.

“Tegan is a sharer,” Sara reflects. “We have a therapist who said that Tegan likes to ‘pull,’ she likes to go out and share things with people. Like we’re going to do a new merch lineup, or we’re going to do demos for songs. She’ll be like ‘I sent these songs to these 10 people and they made a spreadsheet of which songs they like.’ She’s always sending things out to people,” Sara tells PRIDE. “I love Clea. Clea is one of my closest, dearest friends, but I don’t know, that’s not how I operate. It’s not because I don’t trust her, but Tegan is the type of person who’s like, ‘Oh, you’d read our manuscript? Sure, fine, I’ll send it to you,’” Sara laughs.

For Tegan, sending the story to Clea, even at that early stage, just made sense. “We’ve collaborated before,” Tegan explains to PRIDE. “Clea directed us in videos...so it felt very natural, and it was sort of like, oh, if it works out, cool. If it doesn’t, we just get to hang out with our friends. So that felt good.”

For DuVall, the twins’ story, which she devoured in one day, was love at first read. “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 recounts to PRIDE. “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.” She offers the example of Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful, who, twist, falls for Eric Stolz’s character in the end. “You’re like, wait, what? No, no! There was never a story that really felt 100% relatable. So to read this, I was so moved,” she says.

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DuVall knew she needed to be the one to tell this story, not only because she connected with it so personally, but also to protect it — and her friends — through the process. “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,’” she implored.

Sara wasn’t quite ready to take that leap yet. “I think at that stage, I still was like, ‘Oh, let’s see how we even like putting the memoir out,’” before jumping into an adaptation. Fortunately, she says, “It was such a positive experience! I absolutely loved having the book out in the world, getting to do book readings, and having these really intimate conversations.” It was an entirely new experience for the musicians: having deep conversations about their lives with fans who resonated with that work differently than the duo’s music. “Being a musician is almost like being a poet, there’s something somewhat abstract about it, there’s something sort of ambiguous and opaque about talking about music, but to just sit down with people and have them reference our story from the memoir, it was really satisfying,” Sara says. “And I could see how deeply it was connecting with people. And that’s when I think we really turned up the volume on working on it with Clea.”

With Great Work Comes Great Responsibility

As exciting as that was for DuVall, taking on the project of recounting your dear friends’ story of adolescence came with a great deal of responsibility to get it right. “I was just like, ‘I cannot screw this up,’” DuVall recalls. “All the way through it…that’s what I was just most nervous about. It added an extra layer of pressure because there are like real stakes. Because my relationship with them is so important to me that I didn’t want to let them down.”

The stakes were just as high, if not higher, for the Quins who worried about how it might be perceived by family and friends. “Our music, our career, our public persona, all of that is us,” Tegan explains. “By pulling the goalposts back a few years and putting out High School, we now involve everyone in our life, and the most important people in our life, the [ones] we grew up with and our family.”

“That’s not something that we got permission to do,” she adds. “It’s something that we just did, but we did it with the utmost respect, and they have very courteously put up with us.”

Driven by that sense of responsibility Sara says they felt “really protective over the story and the characters, even as they’ve become somewhat composite of people who are fictionalized versions.” In particular, they were concerned about how family members were portrayed. “People are gonna be like, ‘That’s your mom. So she did all that, right?’” Sara explains. “It doesn’t matter if we say like, ‘Well, sort of,’ or ‘No,’ or ‘It’s been fudged a bit.’ It’s still Tegan and Sara, our brand. Tegan and Sara, our legacy. So we’ve been really mindful and careful through this process.”

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She adds, that DuVall allowed herself to be “artistic and creative, and take liberties” but was also “very protective over what Tegan and I needed.”

Tegan and Sara remained heavily involved — collaborating with DuVall and her writing partner Laura Kittrell — through the entire process, and they insisted on authenticity. “We were so adamant that the show needed to be shot in Calgary and needed to be shot in our actual high school. It needed to feel, texturally and visually, from that time, and from that place,” recalls Sara.

Clea and Laura were really deeply, deeply respectful as we were annoying [them], sending thousands of notes like ‘My dad would never eat that kind of cheese.’” laughs Tegan, who explains that she thought “Well, I can’t control everything, but I can make sure some of the details are right.”

That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been challenges along the way. Tegan shares, “It was the hardest on [our parents]. We’ve already had one round of talking with [them], I’m sure we’ll have another round when the show airs…. It’s gonna be hard. It doesn’t matter that my mom’s being played by an incredible actor (Cobie Smulders) who’s a total babe and does an incredible job on screen. It still isn’t my mom, it isn’t exactly what happened, [and] it’s complicated.”

One of the few moments of conflict Tegan and Sara had with DuVall and Kittrell’s script was about a scene involving the sisters’ mother. “There was one [part] where our mom was going to dump us off in the middle of nowhere, after the rave scene,” Tegan says. “Our compromise was it needs to be clear that she’s dropping us off very close to our dad’s because otherwise, it looks like neglect. I think when you’re thinking about a TV show, and you’re thinking about dramatic arcs...it’s different than when you’re just thinking about our mom.”

But ultimately, Tegan adds “Clea was obsessed with making sure that my mom loved it and enjoyed the show and felt proud.”

Years of being in the public eye have given Sara new perspective. “I’m trying to be more playful, and you know, silly about it. Like, you know, people are gonna think all of this stuff is exactly what happened. But it’s a great story. So it’s not so bad to have people think that this story is exactly our story.”

While Tegan and Sara were focused on the finer details, for DuVall it was most important to tell a story that was internally authentic about girlhood, friendships, coming of age — and, of course, what was to be queer in the ’90s. While not that long ago, it was a very different time for LGBTQ+ kids. “We wanted it to feel very authentic — and sort of without comment, because it was such a thing that you didn’t comment on, you didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t like a political issue. It really was so individual, and it was such a private experience,” DuVall explains. “My coming of age and my coming out and even realizing that being gay was a thing you could be, it was so personal and so internal. And that was really what we wanted to show was the confusion, the innocence. That was really important to us to really capture that.”

The show succeeds in doing just that. It’s alternately intimate and opaque — much like adolescence itself — and told through different perspectives, often exploring the same events through different narrator’s gazes. This Rashomon effect deepens the audience’s understanding of individual characters in a way that creates a powerful feeling of empathy for them, and lends a deeper view into that internal scape that DuVall wanted to put to screen.

“What I think the show captures — and is really beautiful, and it’s absolutely by Clea’s design — is the melancholy and the sort of complicated feeling that was happening internally at that time,” says Sara, and it proves to be very revealing. “That interior world, which, at least for me anyways, was really bound up in fear and insecurity... Some of it was sexuality and identity, but some of it was just also being a really depressed teenager.” For her, seeing that play out during filming, particularly the scenes following her first heartbreak were revelatory. “I remember feeling really moved on set on those days, because I thought, like how my depression and my grief manifested in real life probably looked really different than that. But that is how I remember feeling,” she shares. “That’s how the world looked to me when I was depressed as if everyone else was moving at a different speed. And I was just stuck. I was immobilized by grief and fear, and depression and all of those things.”

Finding the Needle in the Haystack

With a story this meaningful and vulnerable, it was essential to find the right actors to play the roles of Tegan and Sara; it was a task that proved very challenging, DuVall recalls. “We had been seeing a lot of twins, who were great, but they just didn’t feel like Tegan and Sara. They are such specific people and the characters within the show are so specific, that it was just really hard to find people who really felt like them,” she says. “When you’re casting any role, it’s hard, because you need one person to feel like the character. And in this case, we needed two people who were identical twins. That was a really tall order.”

They were deep in the casting process when DuVall recalls getting a surprising message from Tegan. She had been scrolling through TikTok when she came across a pair of 21-year-old gay twins, Seazynn and Railey Gilliland. As she watched them, there was a spark of something recognizable in their dynamic, something that led her to point them out to DuVall.

“The algorithm on TikTok just presented Railey [and Seazynn] to Tegan. And she was like, ‘What about these girls?’” recounts DuVall. “Tegan and Sara became obsessed with them and sent them to Laura and I and we’re like, ‘You’re out of your mind. They’re random people off the internet, who have no aspirations to act. You can’t just make them the stars of our television show. That’s crazy!”

But, in the spirit of collaboration, DuVall and Kittrell agreed to audition the girls. “It wasn’t a hard ‘No,’ but we were just kind of like, ‘This is a pipe dream, let’s not get attached to this idea,’” DuVall recalls. “And so they sent an audition, and they were pretty good. So we were like ‘OK, these are the most promising girls. Let’s bring them here. Let’s have them work with an acting coach, and meet them in real life and like, see how it feels.’”

For Seazynn and Railey, getting the call to Hollywood came as a huge surprise. “We were just working at a pizza shop,” Railey tells PRIDE. “I had gone on my lunch one day, and I go on TikTok, and I have a bunch of mentions, and like, people are tagging me in a video and I’m like, ‘OK, what did I post?” she laughs. “Then I [looked at the video I’m being tagged in] and it’s Tegan and Sara who had made a video saying, ‘Help us get in touch with Railey.’” She followed the musicians back and they quickly reached out. “They sent me a message explaining that they’re a band and that they wrote a book and they have a TV show that they wanted us to audition for,” she recalls.

It’s one of those apocryphal Hollywood stories of a starlet (or in this case starlets) being plucked out of obscurity and spirited away to Tinseltown. But it was especially shocking for Railey and Seazynn, who weren’t even considering acting careers. “We didn’t really have interest in [acting],” Railey shares. “I mean, when I was a little kid, I was like, ‘Oh, that would be fun to act,’ but that was never a focused dream of mine. And even when we got the job, Seazynn still wasn’t a fan of wanting to be an actor.”

“I thought that there was no way that we were going to even show interest in the job,” recalls Seazynn. “I thought that we were just going to continue to live our lives at the pizza shop and then life would go on — but Railey insisted,” she jokes.

The two soon found themselves in a Zoom audition with DuVall, and Railey recounted a funny moment that underscores just how out of the blue and off their radar this turn of events was for the twins. “[During the Zoom meeting] I asked [Clea] if she’d been on television and if she’s an actor. Everybody else in the Zoom kind of giggled,” she shares. Despite — or perhaps in part because of — that moment, the two made a great first impression, and they were sent off to Los Angeles to work with an acting coach. “It was nerve-wracking, not just because of who I’m meeting [but] just because we have to perform an audition and we’ve never done anything like this in front of people and in front of a camera, and just being watched,” Railey adds.

Regardless of their understandable nervousness, the twins left everyone they worked with impressed by their natural talent and their ability to take direction. As DuVall recalls, the acting coach, like she and Kittrell, was initially very skeptical of the inexperienced TikTok stars, but it didn’t take long for her to come around. “She called me and she was like, ‘I love them. They’re so charming. They’re so great. They’re really getting it,’” recounts DuVall. “That was not the call I thought I was gonna get! Then we met them in real life and there is just something so charming about them, they are magnetic. Their charisma was undeniable. So we were just like, ‘OK, let’s do it.’”

From the moment that Tegan slipped DuVall an early copy of High School, the pieces have fallen perfectly into place around this series: the crew, the setting, the network, and finally the casting. It’s as if the universe is just as eager to see this story told as queer and young people are to hear it.

The first four episodes of High School premiere October 14 on Amazon Freevee. Watch the trailer here.

Photographer: Jen Rosenstein @jenrosenstein

Digitech: Josh Fogel @josh_fogel

Photo Assistant & Behind-the-Scenes: Aly Whitman @alywhitman

PA: Vanessa Craig @vanessacraiglist

Hair: Railey & Seazynn, Nancilee Santos @nancileesantos; Tegan & Sara, Leticia Llesmin @leticiallesmin; Clea, Sheridan Ward Hair @ sheridanwardofficial

Makeup: Railey & Seazynn, Courtney Hart @courthart; Tegan & Sara, Leticia Llesmin

Styling: Railey, Seazynn, Tegan & Sara, Jade Hurtado @jadelhurtado; Clea, Edwin Ortega Styling @edwin.j.ortega

RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Meet Railey and Seazynn Gilliland Stars of High School in Pride's first-ever digital cover story.

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