The cast of lesbian comedy Drive-Away Dolls. (Focus Features)
The filmmakers behind the highly-anticipated lesbian road-trip film Drive-Away Dolls wanted to contribute more comedies to the queer world.
Featuring Pedro Pascal, Beanie Feldstein (Booksmart), Colman Domingo (Euphoria), and Matt Damon, Drive-Away Dolls is a lesbian comedy that has been in the works for about 20 years.
And, if the trailer is anything to go by, it’s going to be worth the two-decade wait!
Drive-Away Dolls tells the off-the-wall story of queer best friends Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee after a bad break-up.
But things go awry for the best friends when they cross paths with a gang of criminals en route.
The film marks Ethan Coen’s solo directorial debut in the motion picture world, after parting ways with brother Joel, with whom he created classics like Fargo (1996), No Country For Old Men (2007), and Raising Arizona (1987).
But, Coen didn’t go into this picture entirely on his own. Drive-Away Dolls is a collaboration with his editor and wife Tricia Cooke.
It was Cooke who came up with the original idea for Drive-Away Dolls around 20 years ago, she told Empire Online.
Cooke, who identifies as a lesbian and describes her marriage to Coen as “unconventional”, recalled: “Back then we wanted to make a genre movie, because we lacked those in the LGBT world.
“There really weren’t a lot of comedies for the queer world; still aren’t.”
Coen added: “Neither of us was going to make a mopey lesbian movie, not being capable of that.
“There are movies about the pain of being gay. That can be a good movie or a bad movie, like any other, but that is not something we were going to do. We have people for that.”
The reaction to the first trailer for Drive-Away Dolls has been immense, with viewers rejoicing that “fun cinema is back! And with lesbians!”
If Drive-Away Dolls goes down as well as expected, Coen and Cooke already have more lesbian movies up their sleeves.
In an interview with Collider in 2023, Cooke spilled: “Over the past 20 years, we’ve been writing this lesbian B movie trilogy.
“Not really a trilogy, but the idea was to write three queer B movies that I always thought would just kind of sit in the drawer and our kids would look at one day when they were old and get some laughs. And now we’ve made one of them.”
Coen added: “And we have another one written. The problem with writing two is then you’re obliged to do a third because nobody does two. You gotta do a trilogy.”
Drive-Away Dolls hits cinemas in the UK on 15 March and in the US on 23 February.