The Colleen Hoover boom is here, and the director and stars of Regretting You have an idea of why she’s become so popular. After the short-lived adaptation of her 2015 novel Confess, Hoover quickly became a household name with the 2024 release of It Ends With Us, the adaptation of her polarizing novel that, while similarly dividing critics, was a box office smash, grossing over $351 million.
Regretting You marks the third adaptation of a Hoover novel, telling the story of five lives changed forever when a car accident comes with the revelation that the husband and wife of a pair were cheating with each other, leaving their widows and the former’s daughter grieving and confused. Josh Boone has assembled a star-studded roster for the film’s cat, including Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Willa Fitzgerald and Scott Eastwood.
In honor of the movie’s release, Joe Deckelmeier interviewed Grace, Williams, Franco, Thames, Boone and Sam Morelos for ScreenRant to talk Regretting You. During the conversations, the group were asked their thoughts on why Hoover’s books and their movie adaptations elicit such intense reactions from consumers. For Boone, he found himself drawn to direct the material for “the same reason I’m excited” for its theatrical release, that being the movie’s exploration of “partners and their families“, as well as “love and mortality and people who pass away and leave your life“:
Josh Boone: It just seems like there aren’t really that many movies that come out in theaters anymore that are like that. Colleen Hoover being a superstar is the biggest help to me in my mission to make movies that are for teenagers and have them come out in theaters. They have great music, they’re about people, they have heart, and they’re not so much about spectacle. I like that stuff. I just want the variety that I had in the ’90s when I was a kid. I could go see five movies in a weekend, and they were all different. There’s not enough movies that come out on a weekly basis. The variety’s not enough to do that now. There are still a ton of other movies on streaming and things being made on streaming that would’ve been in theaters back then. But anytime we can push one through that’s actually about people, it’s worth trying to do it.
Thames echoed Boone’s feelings that there is an ability to “relate to the characters and the story itself” in both Regretting You and Hoover’s wider library of work. The star went on to also praise there being a grounded approach to the way the relationships in the story are built, specifically Grace’s Clara and Williams’ Morgan, and express his feeling that “a lot of people can relate to that and see themselves in it“:
Mason Thames: If you go to the movie theaters with your mom and family, I think you can leave the theater, and maybe it can help you guys out a little bit. Especially when there’s some young love going on! I think a lot of people can see this and take something away about their relationship.
Morelos pointed out that it’s the “truthful” and “really unabashed” core of Hoover’s work that so often inspires the intense reactions that they do, denoting that if something elicits a “very middle-ground” reaction, “that’s a bad sign” for its quality:
Sam Morelos: I think to either love it or hate it is to throw caution to the wind and just be like, “This is my story. This is my voice. Here I am!” And I feel like that’s what Colleen does in all of her work. She’s just so unafraid to just put what she creates out there regardless of critics, and I think that’s what draws people to her as well. It’s that other side that’s like, “Oh, my God. This person is so honest.” I really love that about her.
Franco found that Regretting You offered “a little bit for everyone“, praising its story for mixing “these heavy emotions” regarding grief, love and family, while also being “surprisingly funny“, which he credits Williams for. The two-time Emmy nominee also went on to compare the film’s feel to “a Cameron Crowe movie“, listing a few of the Oscar winner’s classics for comparison:
Dave Franco: I think in pretty much every scene, [Allison] attacked it in a way of, “Can we find levity even in these heavier moments?” Which feels real when you’re dealing with heavy stuff. Sometimes the way to get through it is finding that levity. You’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry, you’re going to feel it all. It feels like a Cameron Crowe movie. It’s like Jerry Maguire or Almost Famous or Say Anything. It’s got a little bit for everyone.
Mckenna Grace Found It “Nerve-Wracking” To Play Clara
Mckenna grace looks over at Mason Thames in the trailer for Regretting You
ScreenRant: This film is so heartfelt and such an emotional story, and you really shine as Clara. Can you talk about the biggest challenge of bringing Clara to life, especially when fans already have an image of her in their head?
Mckenna Grace: Gosh, it’s always a little nerve-wracking, bringing a character to life that people are already such a fan of, or that people already have an image in their mind of who she should be. They’ve been reading this book and imagining this character, so it’s a big responsibility to take that on because you’re bringing people’s imaginations to life. You can never truly live up to what people imagined in their minds. For me, I just read the book a million times over. I read the script a million times over and talked to our amazing director every week. I was like, “Can we add this line from the book? Can we put this in? Clara’s thinking this here.” I tried to stay as close to the source material as I could, and I wanted to make the fans as happy as I could. I did what I could, and then I’m like, “Okay, I hope people like it.” I tried to do what I would be happy with, as a fan of the book, of the script, and of the character. Hopefully, I did alright!
ScreenRant: Your relationship with Allison Williams, who plays Morgan, is so central. Was there a scene where you really felt the weight of that mother-daughter tension, one that maybe stuck with you emotionally?
Mckenna Grace: Every scene with her was so fun, but I think that the scene where we finally talk everything out was a little hard. I think that it was hard for me because there were lines on the page, but there were still so many questions I wanted to ask as Clara. I was like, “Shoot, we have a time limit for this movie, so I can’t ask all these questions!” I was just trying to work everything out in my mind. But that one was definitely rad. The big scene of everything coming to a head; everything finally coming out and us talking about it. That one was definitely such a [difficult] day to shoot because it’s like, “God, let’s get it all out there.” But it was always fun to shoot with her.
ScreenRant: Clara is dealing with grief, betrayal, and first love all at once. What was the most challenging part of capturing that emotional push and pull?
Mckenna Grace: All of it! I’m always so scared of overacting. That’s my biggest thing, so I feel like I go too little sometimes. For this, I was like, “Just go for it!” I don’t know. There are just so many emotions, so I was just like, “Let’s put it out there.”
ScreenRant: The energy with Allison was just there between you. Talk to me about cultivating that chemistry onset.
Mckenna Grace: It was really real. We were always fighting, always yelling at each other. I was like, “Allison, no! I love him!” And she’s like, “You’re going to throw away your life!” And so, it was just constant.
Mason Thames: I would overhear this. It was crazy. Me and Dave in the back.
Mckenna Grace: No, I adore Allison. It was super easy. Whenever we got to set, we just hung out a lot in the green room, just sitting around talking. We just had such a good time getting to bring these characters to life, bickering and then being all loving and mom and daughter. It was very natural.
Miller Is “The Closest” Character To Himself Mason Thames Has Ever Played
ScreenRant: You two have such natural chemistry, and this story really hits emotionally. There’s such an effortless rhythm between Clara and Miller, they bicker and joke, but there’s so much heart underneath it all. Talk to me about finding and building such believable chemistry.
Mason Thames: Genuinely, the moment Mckenna and I met, we just clicked so easily. It was just nice, fresh electricity I never had, and getting to do that and just becoming friends a year in advance before filming made it all so much easier. When you go into a job with something like this, somebody we’ve never met before, it can be awkward and just a little strange. But with Mckenna, we were best friends up until that point. It was just fun, and we just had a good time.
ScreenRant: Miller has this quiet strength and humor about him, and it cuts through all the sadness. What did you connect with the most about your character?
Mason Thames: What I loved about it is he’s also a film geek, like I obviously am. I’ve played a lot of different characters, but I think Miller’s definitely different and yet the closest to me that I’ve been able to play. Just doing that was a lot of fun. I love this dude, and it was really cool to step into it, especially with Mckenna and Dave and Allison and everybody else. It was just such a blast. I just love him and wanted to bring him to life for the fans, and for me as well.
Sam Morelos Focused On One Of Lexie’s Key Traits For The “Foundation” Of Their Performance
Sam Morelos as Lexie & Mckenna Grace as Clara in Regretting You
ScreenRant: Sam, you bring such a fun and heartfelt energy to Lexie. Clara is also Lexie’s closest friend, and you’re right there in the middle of everything she’s going through. Can you talk about how you and Mckenna Grace built that connection?
Sam Morelos: Yeah, it’s so easy to be Mckenna’s friend. She’s one of the easiest people to bond and connect with, so it really was such a treat. “Oh, our job is to be friends? Lit. Okay, let’s hang out.” Mason, Mckenna, Ethan, and I were a little friend group. We would hang out on set, and we had a lot of inside jokes. Because we shot in Atlanta, we went to World of Coke, and we just went around, hung out, and we went to Ponce City Market. It was just a really great time, and it felt really authentic and easy. I love it when a relationship and a friendship that you have to create for onscreen becomes effortless because you’re friends in real life.
ScreenRant: Fans of the book already had a version of Lexie in their heads, but did you feel any pressure stepping into the role, or did you feel freedom to make the role your own?
Sam Morelos: Yeah, in my head, I was genuinely asking, “Is there any Lexie fan art out there that I could maybe refer to?” There wasn’t much, which kind of sucked for me, but whatever. But I read the passages with Lexie in them, and I used that as a tether or a touchstone for me. Lexie has such a colorful personal life that you don’t really get to see in the movie because you’re really pressed for time. But Lexie is working three jobs all the time, and her mom isn’t really involved. I carried that with me and was inspired by that. It’s like, “That’s why she’s so light, because the rest of her life is so heavy.” There’s a real strength and power in the people who have it really hard to transform that energy into something lovely and light and fun. I took that foundation, built upon that, and was really inspired by Colleen’s character work. I just had a really good time with Lexie because I can relate to her in that I’m trying to make light of every situation.
Williams & Franco “Spent Months Fine-Tuning” Their Scenes Together
ScreenRant: This film captures so many shades of love, regret, and forgiveness. You both are the emotional anchors of this movie, and Morgan and Jonah’s history is so layered. Talk to me about working together to find that emotional truth of those quieter moments.
Allison Williams: You really nailed the bulk of what our offscreen work went towards. We spent months fine-tuning the scenes between the two of us because we don’t have a lot of real estate in the movie to establish what it was like before, what it’s like now, and then to set the breadcrumbs for where the audience is going to hope that it ends up later. We wanted each of those glances, each of those moments of silence, to be full of meaning and backstory.
Dave Franco: And pretty much every single scene that we had together, we would huddle up with our director, Josh Boone, and the three of us would kind of just tear it apart in a way. We’d be like, “Okay, is this the best version of the scene based on what we’ve already shot? Does this make sense now?” Because each scene is so nuanced. We’re dealing with such grief and heavy emotions, but at the same time trying to build this romance. You’ve just got to be really delicate with that.
ScreenRant: Alison, you’ve played many characters wrestling with control before, but Morgan’s struggle feels more about learning to let go. What clicked for you about her journey?
Allison Williams: Everything. Parenthood and motherhood, for me specifically, has been an exercise in letting go. Control is very appealing to me, so I find that it’s been a real growth opportunity for me to be a mom. There’s something that Morgan says to Clara at the end of the movie that I basically wrote from my own perspective, with Josh, that was about coming from a place of fear versus bravery. I think it’s true that Clara is a model for following your instincts and following your passion, which she prescribes to her mom at the beginning of the movie.
But Morgan’s completely lost, has no idea what she feels passionate about, doesn’t know what she wants to do because, sitting next to her, her daughter has been her passion, which is something so many people can relate to. I feel like that was word salad slightly, but you hit the nail on the head. I feel like, as a mom, my biggest struggle has been letting go of control. It’s beautiful to see what happens when you do.
ScreenRant: There’s a big reveal that shifts everything, and it affects every character in this film. How did that change the way that you viewed Morgan and Jonah’s choices throughout the rest of the film?
Allison Williams’ Morgan, Mckenna Grace’s Clara and Dave Franco’s Jonah all looking sad in church pews in Regretting You
Allison Williams: It changes everything for the two of them, obviously. What’s so tough about this thing that they find out is that it makes the grief that they’re going through so complicated, and it deprives them of a clean sadness. They deal with it very differently. Obviously, Morgan is up and down, and she goes through all the stages of grief within a span of several minutes; a lot of white wine, a lot of Real Housewives. But I think that they realize that they’ve been around people who were living like they might die tomorrow and doing the things that they wanted to do. Slowly, it occurs to Morgan and Jonah that they too can live that way, and why aren’t they?
ScreenRant: I have a 10-year-old little girl, and watching this movie made me think I was looking into the future because. Talk to me about working with Mckenna to kind of really build that real mother-daughter relationship.
Allison Williams: Mckenna is a delight. She’s a genuinely kind, incredibly talented person, so yelling at her and feeling friction with her was the hardest part of doing this job. And in almost all the scenes we had together, we were butting heads! We started to really look forward to the scenes where we were even just neutral. That was something we were really excited about. But she’s amazing. She can tap into such a depth of emotion so quickly, portray emotions that are bigger than her years, and just show how experienced she is as an actor. She’s incredible.
Scott Eastwood Leaned On “The Good Things” About Chris Rather Than His “Complicated Secrets”
Scott Eastwood’s Chris wrapping his arm around Allison Williams’ Morgan in Regretting You
ScreenRant: You bring so much quiet intensity to the role of Chris, who seems like the picture-perfect husband. But as the story unfolds, things get really complicated. How did you approach playing those layers without turning him into a villain?
Scott Eastwood: I think I just had to lean into the good things about him. He was a great father, and I could lean into that. And then it’s just knowing that, underneath, there are complicated secrets going on.
ScreenRant: There’s an unspoken guilt that kind of lingers around Chris even in moments when he is not saying much. Talk to me about playing that emotional restraint.
Scott Eastwood: Yeah, you’ve just got to live the reality that you might be doing something that could really hurt somebody else, and that weighs on you.
ScreenRant: How did you tackle that turning point in order to keep your performance grounded and honest?
Scott Eastwood: I am not the best at intellectualizing that much about acting. You just kind of do. You read the script a ton of times, and once you’ve read it a ton of times and done the work and done your homework, you just go and do the thing.
ScreenRant: Josh is such a fantastic director, and this is right up his wheelhouse, but he also has a lot of range.
Scott Eastwood: It really is great because he really knows what he wants, but he’s also a very steady, calm, cool customer. That’s what I really like in a director. I don’t like a screamer. It all starts at the top in any organization, and he leads the ship really nicely.
ScreenRant: This film is based on Colleen Hoover’s book, and her stories always hit people emotionally. What does Regretting You say about love, regret, and choices?
Scott Eastwood: That’s all we have. I mean, choices are everything. They have consequences for the good and the bad, and that’s what you hang your hat on. I think you are your choices.
Josh Boone Made A Soundtrack For Regretting You Before Making The Film
ScreenRant: Josh, this story feels like such a natural fit for you because you’re so good at exploring love and loss in deeply human ways. You’ve said you were drawn to a story about parents and kids realizing their flaws in each other. Talk to me about what made Regretting You feel so personal?
Josh Boone: I think a lot about that moment when you’re a teenager, when you realize that your parents are real people and that they’re fallible. They’re human, they have an inner life you don’t know about, and they’ve made sacrifices for you that you don’t know about. I think that’s almost a seminal moment for teenagers to become adults. They almost have to go through that to come out on the other side. I’ve always made coming-of-age films. My first movie was similar to this one in many ways because of the thematic stuff. Finding out that your parents aren’t who you thought they were was a big part of my first movie. It had a parent storyline and kid storyline, and I wove through both of them.
So, I’d done this sort of thing before, and I just really connected to this story and these characters. I’d never read a book by her before they offered it to me, but I had seen her books everywhere, so I knew she was a hugely famous author. My daughter, who’s 14, has read some of her books. Once I read the book, I questioned that. I was like, “We’re going to talk about this!” [Laughs] But I really made it for her in some ways. She’s just four years younger than Mason and Mckenna, so they feel like my kids in some ways. I like to make movies for her occasionally, and things that she might like. It probably would take a therapist to figure it out. Why do I make coming-of-age movies over and over? Why are they about parents and children? Why are they about mortality? Why is there levity and humor? I don’t know. It’s the one thing I seem to be decent at doing.
ScreenRant: You’ve always had such distinct visual and musical language in your films, from The Fault in our Stars to Regretting You. What role did music play in shaping the tone and emotional rhythm of this story?
Josh Boone: The very first thing I do before I accept a job, or before I write an original screenplay or work on an adapted screenplay is make a soundtrack. It’s the very first thing that I do, and it’s almost how I convince myself that I can make the movie. What I’m looking to make is a tonal map of the movie. There might be five or six anchor songs, and I know exactly where they go. They’re in the movie now exactly as I put them in the script.
And then there’s a bunch of other songs that I find along the way with my music supervisor, Season Kent, who knows the things that I want in the movie. She knows my taste very well because we’ve done everything together. So, it starts with me, and then it ends up being a collaboration by the end. But Cameron Crowe is probably one of my very favorite filmmakers. I love him with all my heart. He was kind enough to sign a copy of Fast Times at Ridgemont High that I had my agent send him back when I made The Fault in our Stars.
His movies meant so much to me when I was young, from Say Anything to Singles to Jerry McGuire, and Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky. The way he used music meant a lot to me. I also think about George Lucas writing the songs that were on the radio on every page of the script of American Graffiti. That wasn’t quite done as a stylization, but he thought about it. I worked at a record store for many years before I made movies, and I have more records than you should, but music and movies and books are the biggest things in my life. So, my movies are the best way to funnel them all together.
