“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.”
