They say you can’t go home again. But what if sometimes — at least in the movies — you can? That’s basically the premise behind Chasing Summer, an indie comedy about going back where you came from to find yourself once more. This is, of course, fairly well-trod ground thematically speaking — there’s basically an entire subgenre of Reese Witherspoon films about this very topic — but for comedian, writer, and star Iliza Shlesinger, it was a much more personal story.
“I wrote Chasing Summer at a time in my life when I was sort of transitioning. I was either engaged or about to get married — it was 2018, and I went back, and I looked at a little note that I sent myself, and I was realizing that, you know, you get married to someone, you’re a full adult,” she tells Den of Geek. “I was so happy, but I was also mourning the time in your life when you can still be a kid, when you can still go home.”
Shlesinger plays Jamie, a 40-something disaster relief worker whose life is turned upside down when she gets dumped by her long-term boyfriend. With nowhere else to go, she finds herself heading back to live with her parents for the summer in the small Texas town she hasn’t seen in two decades. Complications immediately ensue.
To be fair, there are reasons for this. Jamie has some fairly dramatic history with several members of her hometown, including Chase, the former football star ex that cheated on her (Tom Welling), and the painful rumors that dogged their break-up. But in order for her to move forward, she’ll have to reconnect with her past.
“I’m from Dallas, and those summers at home, the years right after high school, where you’re a full person but you don’t have a ton to do, and you don’t have the responsibility and the weight of everything – I wanted to cast that in amber,” she says. “That being at home, being frustrated, and still having fun. Your relationships don’t matter as much, your summer job doesn’t matter. There’s no more of that once you become someone’s wife and a mother and you have a career. So I wanted to sort of have that summer that I could always go back to because I have such fond memories of those things. I just wanted to make something personal.”
As for the cast, Shlesinger says that she “was so excited” when former Smallville star Welling signed on to take part in the film.
“I saw him on Lucifer. It was in the pandemic, and I consumed like 500 episodes of it, and I was like, who’s this beefy man? And I had him in mind for this,” she explains. “I was like, ‘We should get Tom Welling.’ And, our fingers were crossed the whole time, just like ‘Can you just make his reps make him say yes?’”
Welling, for his part, says he felt an immediate connection to the project.
“I’ve said this story before, but I was sent the script, and I was reading the script, and my wife walked in and I was giggling out loud. She goes, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m reading a script’, and she’s like, ‘What’s it about?’ I said ‘I haven’t finished it yet. She asks who’s in it. I said, ‘Iliza Shlesinger’ And she goes: ‘You’re doing it’. ‘Well, I haven’t finished [reading] it’. And she says, ‘No, you’re doing it’. So I may have jumped on that Zoom call with you before I finished the script.’
In addition to her past with Chase, Jamie must also navigate her relationships with her “complicated” family, including her parents, Layanne (Megan Mullally) and Randall (Jeff Perry), and her older sister (Cassidy Freeman), who owns a local roller skating rink.
“It actually is really fun to play someone who’s a little messy, because I think we all are messy somewhere,” Freeman, the former The Righteous Gemstones star who plays Jamie’s sister Marissa, says. “It’s something that we hide, we don’t show, or we’re ashamed of. So to be able to play a character like Marissa that not only has such specificity to her, is like, such a tactile thing, but to be able to just go for it and be messy and be like ugly in what you say and loud and like be a dickhead to your sister…that was fun. Amber was very reserved [in The Righteous Gemstones]. Amber was like, everything is perfect, and your ass is always tight. This was, I could let it go. I could let it all hang out with Marissa. It was relaxing.”
As a unit, the film’s cast is full of praise for one another’s performances and talent.
“I feel like, with all the actors here, but especially Cassidy, who got nominated for a Critics Choice Award for The Righteous Gemstones, she can seamlessly go from comedy to drama so quickly,” Aimee Garcia, who plays Amanda, one of Jamie’s former high school classmates, adds. “She’s very funny in this movie, as everyone is, but I think the heartfelt moments are what make it so unique, when you have have actors that can be laugh out loud, physical comedy, funny, but then can also rip your heart out in those beautiful dramatic scenes.”
“We were very lucky,” Shlesinger says. “All of these actors have been acting longer than I have, and we got really lucky with this caliber of actors and [their] professionalism. Everybody really wanted to be there. None of us made a billion dollars from being in this movie. But we all had the best time.”
A big part of Chasing Summer’s appeal is that it not only puts a fresh spin on a familiar genre, it does so by grounding its story in a very specific location and setting.
“This is a Texas movie,” Shlesinger says. “We were so fortunate to go to Sundance, but this, at its core, is a South by Southwest movie. It’s a love letter to Texas. I know people have a lot of opinions on a lot of things going on in the world, but we should all be allowed to view our own nostalgia through rose-colored glasses. And it’s a love letter to Texas and our own millennial nostalgia.”
Shlesinger isn’t the only cast member who hails from Texas, and the movie itself is steeped in the traditions of the Lone Star State.
“It feels like a homecoming for Iliza, Josephine [Decker, the film’s director], and myself, being Texans, but also for the film itself,” Garett Wareing says. “ It’s set in Texas. We got references to Texas A&M and Whataburger and all the things that Texans love, including Bucc-ees. Shoutout.”
Some of those traditions, of course, are more recent than others.
“That is newer. That was not around when I was growing up,” Shlesinger laughs. “People are all like, ‘Oh, you don’t know Bucc-ees?“ I’m like, you’re a child. It was not there when I was a kid.”
Chasing Summer premiered January 26 at the Sundance Film Festival and screened again on March 17 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a theatrical release date.
