For the previous 25 years, Tegan and Sara Quinn have dominated the music trade as indie-rock stalwarts and beloved brazenly queer voices. The Canadian-born sisters have launched 10 studio albums, carried out onstage with Taylor Swift, collaborated with everybody from Tiësto to Beach Bunny, and wrote a memoir detailing their coming-of-age experiences as twins and musicians exploring id. So it was solely pure that the aforementioned memoir, High School, grew to become a TV show.
The expertise of it, for Sara, was fairly jarring. “The largest group of people we’ve ever collaborated with, on an album or a tour, for example, would be like maximum 20 people. There were days where I was on set where it was 100-plus people. It was just an absolutely massive enterprise,” she explains.
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Created by Clea DuVall and government produced by Tegan and Sara, the Amazon Freevee sequence High School follows Tegan and Sara by way of the period of ‘90s grunge, and as they discover themselves, love, and music. Casting themselves accurately on the series was pivotal. The sisters “cast a pretty wide net” trying to find the right actors to play them on-screen. While they saw dozens of auditions, Tegan was struck by inspiration from a TikTok scroll. “I saw Railey on TikTok and just thought she was so entertaining. She was talking to the camera, giving a tour of her car, and I was like, ‘This is like me in high school,’” she explains. Tegan did a deep dive on her web page and there was little question: She advised Sara that Railey and Seazynn Gilliland wanted to play them on-screen.
“We ended up putting up a video on TikTok and asked people to help us get them to follow us, so we could send them a message,” explains Tegan. Within a few hours, Railey replied and the sisters agreed to audition. Fast-forward to a few months later, the duo was calling the TikTok stars on Zoom to inform them they had been forged within the sequence. “There’s just something about them,” Tegan says. “They’re so raw, they’re still figuring out who they are as people, they’re still trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives, and they bring that into their performance.” The undeniable fact that Railey and Seazynn Gilliland weren’t seasoned actors or musicians made all of them the extra alluring to the sisters.
[Photo courtesy of Amazon Freevee]
As government producers, Tegan and Sara “got to do as much or as little” as they needed, however they selected to be concerned in each aspect of the show — right down to the rating, which was maybe what they thought-about some of the essential components.
“There was a playlist made at the very beginning of the process where Tegan and I put all the music we listened to when we were actually in high school [together],” Sara explains. It was stuffed with each native bands who launched music on the time and a number of the artists they found within the ‘90s like the Pixies or the Violent Femmes.” But working with the music supervision team, including That Dog’s Anna Waronker, was “really special,” and ultimately they were able to build out a soundtrack featuring Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Sinéad O’Connor.
Turning their memoir into a TV show had some emotional challenges. “For me, a memoir is your version of the story. It’s your perspective. Everyone goes in knowing that you don’t fill in the details of what other people thought and felt. And for the TV show, of course, you have to add that dimension, you have to populate your show full of characters that you know their thoughts and feelings,” explains Tegan. So, fictionalizing their mother or making composites of their closest buddies was difficult. “It’s complicated because you don’t want your mom or your friends to watch it and go, ‘That’s not what I was like,’” she provides. While the possession of writing a guide actually went to Tegan and Sara, that obligation was transferred to [showrunner] Laura [Kittrell] and DuVall as they stuffed out this world on-screen. Ultimately, the essence of these characters are there, however the sisters even have the excuse of “well, it’s not you. It’s a composite,” Tegan adds playfully.
But the making of High School has been undoubtedly rewarding, allowing the sisters to rethink their approach to what else they’re working on: “I’m excited to see how it changes the way that Tegan and I tell future stories.”
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