Julia Stiles is absolutely a romance movie icon, starring in beloved films like 10 Things I Hate About You and Save the Last Dance, but now she’s stepped behind the camera in the genre, directing and writing the new film Wish You Were Here (now in theatres). Starring Canadian Mena Massoud, along with Isabelle Fuhrman, Gabby Kono-Abdy, Jennifer Grey and Kelsey Grammer, the movie is based on the novel by Renée Carlino, where one magical night with a stranger becomes a deeply emotional love story.
Charlotte (Fuhrman) and her best friend Helen (Kono-Abdy) work at a Mexican restaurant they hate, relying on their friendship to get them through shifts filled with demanding customers. One evening after work they meet Adam (Massoud) and there’s an instant spark with Charlotte. The pair spend a romantic night together, but in the morning Adam is cold, bluntly squashing any feeling Charlotte has for him.
With Charlotte’s mother, played by Grey, urging her daughter to date, she signs Charlotte up on a dating app. After some adjusting from Helen, Charlotte ends up matching with Seth (Jimmie Fails) and they seem to hit it off. But then Charlotte finds out the real reason why Adam quickly pushed her away.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JANUARY 15: (L-R) Gabby Kono-Abdy, Julia Stiles, Mena Massoud and Isabelle Fuhrman attend a screening of “Wish You Were Here” at the Crosby Street Hotel on January 15, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
Gabby Kono-Abdy slid into Julia Stiles’ DMs to get her to direct ‘Wish You Were Here’
While Stiles had been “actively” looking for the right story for her feature directorial debut, it was actually Kono-Abdy who brought the book to Stiles’ attention, after acquiring the rights to the story in 2017.
“When you read Charlotte’s story and you have this strong, feminist human come out, and this resilient person make these bold choices, I immediately thought of Julia,” Kono-Abdy told Yahoo Canada. “I didn’t know if she wanted to go behind the camera and I didn’t know if she wanted to be a director.”
“We’ve seen her in so many movies just be this strong heroine and this romantic lead, and so I felt really, really, really passionate about finding my way to her. And I slid into her Instagram DMs and the rest is history. … I’ve looked up to her for so many years, my whole life. Actually, I kind of followed her to her high school, many years apart, but she inspired me to go to this small school in the city.”
While Stiles identified that she received the book during a time in the COVID-19 pandemic where she was “craving” human connection, she was also interested in the “maturity” of this love story.
“It felt to me like, even though the main characters are so young, we touch on romance and love, not really the first stages of it, love at first sight or the first date, it’s more the idea that you should be so lucky to be able to look back on a lifetime of memories with somebody else,” Stiles said.
[L-R] Isabelle Fuhrman as “Charlotte” and Mena Massoud as “Adam” in the romance film WISH YOU WERE HERE, a Lionsgate releass (Lionsgate)
‘Wish You Were Here’ moments that brought the cast, crew to tears
Much of the weight of Wish You Were Here rests on the chemistry between Fuhrman and Massoud, bringing the audience into this love story in a way where we feel invested in their connection.
“I felt like we really got to know each other so well while we were working on this movie that it feels very real when you’re in the moment,” Fuhrman said.
“Sometimes you act with people and they’re looking at you, but there’s nothing there. I think they’re thinking about their lines, or they’re thinking about something else,” Massoud added. “And I’m very lucky to have worked with Isabelle, because you look at her and you know she’s right there with you, she’s looking deep into your soul and really listening to you.”
A particularly moving element of the film is that Charlotte and Adam fantasize about their life together, coming up with stories about their wedding, having kids, their hobbies together and much more. It’s a powerful element of this love story and something Stiles was particularly inspired by in the novel.
“Renée writes that these characters from day one tell this story of an imagined relationship that they have and their future together, but though they’re looking on the past,” Stiles said. “I remember saying to Isabelle, you’re actually sad when you say this, ‘How many kids did we have and what were they like?’ Because it’s a fantasy, but you know that it’ll never be able to come true.”
“My script supervisor started crying that day on set and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ She’s a tough broad, … it just, it hits a nerve.”
[L-R] Isabelle Fuhrman as “Charlotte” and Mena Massoud as “Adam” in the romance film WISH YOU WERE HERE, a Lionsgate release (Lionsgate)
For Massoud, while there’s a physical transformation that happens for him in Wish You Were Here, the complex work really came from the “emotional space” he had to work in as an actor.
“Near the end of the film, I couldn’t stop crying,” Massoud shared. “We were crying all the time because we were in this space of just tragedy, and even up to a couple of weeks after I wrapped the film I was sad.”
“I blamed it on different things, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sad because the movie’s ended,’ or, ‘Oh, I’m sad because I’m going to be unemployed for a little bit now,’ whatever it was. But I think I was just sad because of the space that we had to build. So often we would do a really emotional scene and we would come out, and one of our producers would be crying, or our script supervisor would be crying, … so it really hit home for them.”
Massoud also hopes that watching Wish You Were Here is a “cathartic” experience for people to “let out” their emotions.
“I think art is cathartic in that way, so I hope that we can do that for people,” he said.