Among the new titles on streaming during this Thanksgiving holiday week is Sweethearts, now available to watch with a Max subscription, which provides something new for fans of romantic comedies. The movie has two best friends and college freshman Jamie and Ben (Kiernan Shipka and Nico Hiraga) deciding to tag team their break up with their respective partners over Thanksgiving break, who are still in high school, to free themselves up for college extracurricular activities. All the while, their mutual friend Palmer (Caleb Hearon) has an unexpected coming out journey that flips the script on what we usually see from the topic.
When CinemaBlend spoke to Caleb Hearon and the Sweetheart filmmakers about the movie’s powerful queer storyline, we learned about how authentic it is to Hearon’s own experience growing up in the Midwest, along with the great care that was placed in it. Hearon also hopes young people in the LGBTQ+ community will be affected by it, saying this:
I think anytime someone does a queer role, they’re like ‘This is for the queer kids,’ But I do hope that some little gay or trans kids in the Midwest watches this and just feels seen and knows that we’re thinking about them and we’re looking out for them, and that it’s going to be OK.
Hearon grew up in rural Missouri, and could very much relate to the character of Palmer, who decides to come out through a literal party during the Thanksgiving break while Jamie and Ben are caught up on their breakup antics. Palmer has decided to move to Paris, France since high school, but he’s not particularly happy there. Hearon spoke further to the storyline with these words:
Dan and Jordan wrote a really true-to-life experience. And, when you’re coming out of the closet in a place like Missouri or Ohio that I did in real life, you do briefly realize you’re not like everyone where you’re from because most people where you’re from are straight. And so then you go, ‘Okay, well am I, bad?’ And then when you get over the idea that you might be bad or fundamentally flawed, you go ‘Well, I must be better than everyone.’ And so there’s this moment where you have to experiment with elitism. Some people stay there, which I think is unfortunate. Hopefully you can move past that, which I think Palmer is via the relationship with Joel and Tramell’s character in the movie.
Sweetheearts was written by two real-life best friends, Dan Brier and Jordan Weiss, who told us they wrote the script after talking out their own relationship experiences on a besties road trip. When it came to Palmer’s side plot, they enlisted actual LGBTQ+ actors to play the queer roles, including Severance Season 2 cast member Tramell Tillman and Joel Kim Booster.
Weiss told us that having queer actors on the set of Sweethearts “added a lot” to the storyline Palmer goes through during the Max movie. Because instead of Palmer coming out to his peers, he comes across a queer couple (Tillman and Booster) living in his hometown. He is surprised they have stayed in the rural area and have found their own community when he felt like he needed to escape in order to be happy. As Hearon continued:
They show him that you can still be a part of this place where you’re from, and you can still be who you are around here. But, yeah, it’s a really tough experience, and it’s interesting when you get so far out of it as I am now, having come out a long time ago and having made peace with the Midwest and being from a rural place and kind of reclaiming some of those things and saying ‘No, people who don’t like queer people, or whatever, they don’t get to own the Midwest. I’m also from there. When you get so far out of it, you forget how big it feels. But God, it feels monumental.
Hearon is 29 himself, and thus worlds away from the place Palmer is in as a college freshman, but was happy to tell Sweetheart’s authentic plotline and praised how the LGBTQ+ story was authentically handled. Sweethearts is streaming now, and you can check out what other upcoming LGBTQ+ movies are on the way here on CinemaBlend.
