The Sun Is Also A Star

IT ALL STARTED WITH A POP-TART. A homemade strawberry Pop-Tart, to be exact.

- Samantha Highfill

Yara Shahidi (grown-ish) and Charles Melton (Riverdale) were taking a break in the middle of their chemistry read for The Sun Is Also a Star when he asked for a bite of her dessert. “I will give you literally anything I own, except my dessert,” Shahidi says of her general food-sharing philosophy. “He asked for some, and it was an anomaly of a moment for me because I said yes. That was the beginning of our bond because it was really out of character for me.”

Bonding is the central ingredient in the love story of Natasha Kingsley and Daniel Bae. Based on Nicola Yoon’s 2016 book, The Sun Is Also a Star follows the teenagers for a (very important) day in both of their young adult lives. Daniel, a Korean- American, is preparing for a college interview, and Jamaican-born Natasha has 24 hours to stop her family from being deported. But when Natasha and Daniel meet for the very first time on the streets of New York City, they can’t help but wonder if they were meant to be together. Or at least Daniel can’t. “I loved the way the gender roles are reversed,” director Ry Russo-Young says. “As a female director, you read a lot of scripts that are very traditional. In this, she’s the science nerd, and he’s the romantic and the poet.”