Daniel and Ryan are best friends—actors who hang out together, get high, and have fun. But all good things come to an end: Ryan is moving away and starting a new life in Canada with his fiancé. Determined to create lasting memories before leaving, Ryan thrusts a moviemaking idea upon Daniel, one in which they’ll play themselves making a movie about making a movie. Daniel’s head hurts. Ryan thinks the project is credible, but it needs a hook. “What if I were secretly gay all my life?” suggests Daniel. Impressed, Ryan remarks, “Wow, that’s really in right now”. Daniel side-eyes the fourth wall tellingly.
Extremely Unique Dynamic astutely explores the layers of beautiful bullshit that best bros will enact upon each other to express how they actually feel. Along the way, there’s winking acknowledgment of the tropes inevitably involved in engaging Asian American screen representation, closeted queerness, and exhaustingly layered metafiction. Speaking with Purple Hour ahead of the film’s UK premiere at Queer East, directors and stars Ivan Leung (who plays Daniel) and Harrison Xu (who plays Ryan) cotton on fast to the idea that an interview can extend a film’s dialogue, taking that notion literally as they ricochet off into hilarious tangents. As with the film itself, it’s never quite clear where the performance ends and the truth begins.
*****
Purple Hour: I want to start out by acknowledging that doing an interview for this film feels fascinatingly redundant. Extremely Unique Dynamic continuously comments on itself as it goes along, and it anticipates the questions that might arise from watching it. How many interviews have you done for this film so far, and how have you found the experience of answering questions on a film that somewhat already answers them?
Ivan Leung: This is a trick question. Definitely a trick question. Well, I like to answer questions about us making the film, because it makes me happy to field questions from an interviewer who is smarter than most and is trying to confuse the person who doesn’t understand anything. So I’m going to pass it on to Harrison, because I know that you probably know that I’m not the one that’s going to be able to answer the question that you want me to answer, because I’m not the smart one.
Harrison Xu: Wow, that was such an eloquent answer. You are smart, Ivan! We’ve probably done 50+ interviews. But this is the first interview that started with that question. In a way, I feel like this interview is a meta extension of the film. It just goes one level deeper.
IL: Let me ask you, did you like my answer to your question about answering the question?
Absolutely. It extends the film beautifully. We see the formation of the film’s idea on screen of course, but that’s your fictional selves talking. Taking us a layer out, how did the concept first come to you? What made you go, okay, this is a viable feature film?
HX: The inception of it is a meta extension of the film itself. We’re both actors, and we’ve been friends for over ten years. We worked together professionally on the marketing for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), and it worked really well. High on the floor, eating Thai food, we spitballed ideas. It came to us pretty quickly, similar to in the movie.
There’s a third collaborator, Katherine Dudas, who serves as the film’s co-writer and co-director. Tell me about her part in the film’s development.
HX: Neither of us had directed anything before. By happenstance, we got served a TikTok of hers where she was like, “Hey, I just did a film, low budget, mostly improvised, and we sold it to Paramount”. And that was a lot of what we wanted to do. We reached out to her, and she decided to come on as that third writer-director. It was our first time doing anything like this, and she really helped guide it. Ivan and I were in every scene, and it’s hard to step back as actors and direct yourself, so it was good having that third person behind the camera who was able to offer that additional perspective.
IL: We had two other integral people. Noel Do-Murakami, our producer, who’s also queer and Asian. When we were filming, he would ask us, “Hey, what about this perspective?”, which was extremely helpful to me. And Michael Scotti Jr., our editor and associate producer—his point of view on the relationships and dynamic [were also helpful], and he’s an amazing editor. It was a big team effort.
You do a cool thing with the opening montage that reassures the viewer that they haven’t made a dreadful mistake in purchasing a ticket. You knowingly checklist tropes of Asian American representation, of clickbait YouTube content, of closet guy best friend coming-outs. You get the simple ways of approaching these topics out of the way, then you go for something more nuanced.
IL: At first, I come off as a very simple guy. But then you get to know me and wow, what a nuanced experience you’re about to have—especially in this interview.
HX: You’re like an onion, like in Shrek—and like our characters. To your point, there are all these tropes, but we tackle them head-on and on the nose. The characters don’t really realise what they’re actually talking about. One layer of metaness removed, they’re talking about it, but they’re not talking about it. Later, when it’s all unravelled, we see the characters peel back all the layers and have that real conversation. We addressed all these things at the beginning of the movie, so now we’re able to have this real heart-to-heart genuine moment.
IL: And it feels like that in real life, too. Making this movie, I became a lot more vulnerable with Harrison. And vice versa? He’s not speaking right now. It’s interesting—as actors, we’re always put in audition situations where we have to be vulnerable. We have to say things in movies that we’re not able to talk about in real life. As guys, it’s hard to talk about feelings. We can be a bit braver [on screen], because we have a character to put in front of us to say these things—it feels a lot less embarrassing, and it feels like a buffer. If it gets too real, we could say, “Oh, I was playing a character”. But that’s an excuse.
Who did you think the audience was? Have you been surprised by the film’s journey?
HX: Initially, we just wanted to make the movie we wanted to make, without any audience in mind. There’s that scene where we’re like, “we get the indie audience, we get the Asian audience, we get the queer audience”, but we just hoped that people enjoyed it as a comedy first and foremost.
It’s been interesting going to film festivals, whether Asian, queer, or festivals in Canada versus the US, because people latch on to different jokes. At the Asian festivals, people love the Hudson Yang gag and the Fresh Off the Boat references. In Warsaw and Germany, I was worried the comedy might not translate, but 90% of the jokes landed. It’s been pretty universally well-received. We’re just happy that people are first of all watching the movie, and that they’re resonating with it.
IL: I feel there are two camps. People either say, “I made this for myself”, or they say, “I made this with the audience in mind”. My standpoint is that we really did do this for ourselves. We’ve been actors for 10+ years, and I had a lot of things that I wanted to show and had never been given the opportunity to. There aren’t characters that really fit, or when they do, they go for the same actors, or actors that aren’t Asian, or people that don’t look like us—because we’re not the typical male leads. It felt really cathartic. I’m not just the best friend or the side character. Anyone can be the main character of their life or a movie, because we all deserve to be.
How much of the film is improvised and how much is tightly scripted?
HX: It’s a pretty tight script; the bones are all there. Within the scenes, we left a lot of room for improvised dialogue. We would shoot with two cameras and just riff. But there were certain moments in the film that we really wanted to hit. It takes a certain scene partner to be able to do that. Ivan and I have known each other for a long time, so we had the chemistry that allowed for that free-flowing dialogue and natural feel.
How did it feel in practice to be playing characters playing characters? Or, when you were playing characters playing characters, did it not feel like you were playing characters playing characters?
IL: You’re trying to confuse me again, and I totally get it. You sound just like another Harrison doing all this.
HX: The Russian doll of characters is so fun to play. One of my favourite scenes is that porch scene. It’s the first time that we see the characters having to really think about which level they’re playing within the scenes. We question the line of what’s real and what’s fake. We see them hiding behind that other character that they’ve created. And the bad acting was super fun.The more you put on a character and you’re less authentic to yourself, the worse the acting is and the worse the product becomes. It was fun playing into that.
IL: It’s kind of like laundry detergent—the more you dilute it, the less effective it is.
One common meta trope you avoid is naming the characters after yourselves.
HX: We wanted to showcase our abilities as actors, so we didn’t want it to feel like we were just playing ourselves. If we had used our own names, I think people would watch it with the notion that we were. But a lot did mirror our lives. When we were shooting, I was engaged and about to get married. I was going to Vancouver, not Edmonton. We changed it to Edmonton because we wanted somewhere with fewer acting opportunities. Things were changed for dramatic effect—we didn’t want it to mirror our lives completely.
IL: Yeah, I don’t have rich parents, and that isn’t my house. I live a very frugal, sad life.
You make the meta element meaningful by making it about queerness and the truth of one’s feelings. Returning to the onion, you peel back the layers to find that.
HX: Ivan has mentioned that it’s sometimes easier to come out to people you aren’t close with than the people that you are. With the meta layers, our characters’ characters are able to talk about it, but our characters aren’t able to. It’s something that we wanted to call out about close friendships—that even though you’re close, you don’t have that type of conversation easily. We wanted to show that you can.
IL: It’s hard for me to express myself sometimes. I’ve been gay all my life—ever since third grade when I sat next to a guy and was like, “I don’t know why I like you, so I’m just gonna give you my Jolly Ranchers”. A lot of queer films are very painful and sad.I wanted to have a coming-out story where it wasn’t, “Oh, I’m in love with my best friend”, or all those tropes. Being queer is a sexuality, not a personality, and there are a lot of different types of queerness. I’m not sassy, I’m not this or that—I’m just myself, and being gay is simply part of me.
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Extremely Unique Dynamic screens as part of the 2025 Queer East on Monday, 28 April.
Watch the trailer for the film here:
