Exclusive Interview
‘The Summer Oath’: Maya Hawke & KJ Apa on Creating Rom-Com Magic Despite Never Meeting
What To Know
- KJ Apa and Maya Hawke star in a new rom-com project together, The Summer Oath, an Audible Original.
- Both actors discussed the unique challenges and joys of recording an audio rom-com.
- Apa and Hawke explain to Swooon why they’re drawn to lighthearted, feel-good stories, expressing a desire to create work that brings joy to audiences.
KJ Apa and Maya Hawke met 30 minutes before our Zoom call, but you would’ve never guessed it based on their characters’ chemistry in The Summer Oath, the latest Audible Original romance.
The Summer Oath, which is now available for download, is an audiobook rom-com inspired by William Shakespeare‘s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Hawke plays Livia, a romance author with writer’s block. When Livia house-sits a secluded Hamptons estate to work on her latest book, her two best friends join her. They agree to keep their summer romance-free. The arrival of Livia’s college crush, Ezra (Apa), who claims to have reserved the estate for his group of friends, upends their plan.
“I’m always surprised that any of it works without us hearing each other,” Hawke said in a joint interview with Apa. “It’s so crazy that two people who were not in the same room, never met, not talking to each other, totally out of context, read a scene, and then that scene can be combined, and it somehow works. It blows my mind.”
Though Hawke has some in the works, The Summer Oath marks her first rom-com project. Apa couldn’t recall any past projects that helped him for his latest role — for which he had to brush off his American accent skills — but Hawke recalled working on an audiobook of Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
“That made me understand why there are stories about actors picking up chairs and destroying them while doing audiobooks, and I think that the difficulty of that prepared me for this,” she said. “[In] Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the sentence structure is so sophisticated and difficult that I think that really helped prepare me to take on these larger chunks of dialogue because nothing could be as hard as that was.”
The Summer Oath was a totally different experience from that project, which Hawke said made her cry basically every time she left the studio. She was worried she was “going to lose [her] mind again doing [The Summer Oath]” because she had a packed filming schedule during recording. “I was overjoyed,” she said of working on the rom-com. “I remember leaving the studio after the first day and calling my husband, and being like, ‘It wasn’t that bad! It was okay, I did okay. It was fun, actually. I had fun.’ And he was like, ‘Good, okay, I’m relieved.'”
Part of the fun was in the nature of the project itself. The “light-hearted and fun” story is what drew Apa to The Summer Oath. “My favorite movies are those movies where I feel just at ease watching,” he said. “One of my favorite movies is Four Christmases with Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. I just love that movie. Rom-coms like that I can watch all day.”
Hawke, who says she first started reading romance a year ago and is “obsessed and addicted now,” was drawn to Livia and Ezra’s dynamic because of the crush aspect of it. “I guess I truly am a person who — and this is not necessarily a good quality — has always loved a crush,” Hawke said. “I love to have them. I love movies about them. It is like the biggest high I’ve ever had in my life is like that, and it’s so fun to get to act it out.”
She continued, “I’ve always wanted to do a rom-com, and I really did my first two rom-coms this year, but both of them, the character dynamic was like later in a relationship, and I’ve never gotten to act out having a crush. It’s my favorite feeling, and I’m still like dying to do a cinematic crush, but this was so… It’s just so fun to live inside a crush. It’s just the best.”
Apa hopes that The Summer Oath listeners get the same feeling he gets when he watches Four Christmases. “My favorite thing is to make things that people feel… They get home from the end of the day, they can chuck something on, and they can just chill out and just feel a little bit tapped out,” he explained. “It’s a little bit of an escape, but it makes you feel good. That’s the point of why I make things, and I hope that the things that I’m part of give people a positive experience.”
He explained that he’s never been drawn to projects with darker themes, which Hawke chimed in to agree with. “I’ve done some darker stuff, but when I read a dark script, how I react if it’s good is, ‘Oh no, it’s good.’ Like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to go to this horrible place, but it’s good.’ And I will, I guess. I really like stuff that’s uplifting, and it makes people more excited to live their life, not less.”
Hawke wants to work on things like The Summer Oath that “make people have more faith in the world, not less, and more belief that right around the corner, joy could be waiting for you. The next big love, the next big joy, the next big adventure could just be right around the corner of your life.”
“It is waiting for you,” Apa added.
