🎧 How Jenny Han Tricked ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ Fans (in the Best Way)

During a live conversation, Gen Z’s rom-com queen told me how she keeps surprising audiences

SUMMER OF LOVE The Summer I Turned Pretty creator Jenny Han, right, with me in Hollywood last week. “I wanted the audience to see Belly the way that Conrad does,” Han told me about her directorial debut during the final season. (The Ankler illustration; Todd Williamson)

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Jenny Han knows when she’s messing with people, and she doesn’t really seem to regret it. The creator and co-showrunner of The Summer I Turned Pretty, as well as the author of the three books that inspired the series, gleefully spent the summer following along online as fans debated the show’s central love triangle (Team Conrad vs. Team Jeremiah) and scheduled watch parties for the series finale. She also knew they were operating on bad information: as a red herring and to prevent spoilers, actor Gavin Casalegno, who plays Jeremiah, had traveled to Paris the previous year to film fake scenes with star Lola Tung that were never actually part of the show.

“I’m somebody who likes to surprise the audience because I like to be surprised,” Han, 45, told me during a live taping of the Prestige Junkie podcast at the West Hollywood EDITION last week (and sponsored by Prime Video). “I like that little knot of anxiety that I get, wondering, ‘Is this going to end the way I hope it is or not?’ To me, that’s part of the experience of a story.”

It was undoubtedly a massive part of the experience for fans of both the books and the show, who wondered if heroine Belly (Tung) would choose Conrad (Christopher Briney), as she had at the end of the books, or go through with her engagement to his brother, Jeremiah. Her relationships with both brothers are the heart of The Summer I Turned Pretty, and took a fascinating turn in the fifth episode of season 3, “The Last Dance,” which focused on Conrad’s point of view and marked Han’s directorial debut.

Han, whose books in the To All the Boys I Loved Before and The Summer I Turned Pretty series — as well as their Hollywood adaptations — have made her a rom-com phenomenon, told me about why it was so important to step behind the camera for this particular episode, and what she learned about these characters and herself by taking on this new challenge. And yes, the peach scene — fans know what I’m talking about, but for those who don’t, watch here — was definitely part of it. “I knew that some of the most iconic moments from the book would take place from his POV,” Han says of the episode, the only one of the series to be narrated by Conrad. “He, as a character, is in some ways the most elusive, but he’s somebody I’ve always thought of as having a very busy mind. So I was excited to let people have a peek into that brain.”

TABLE SERVICE From left: The Summer I Turned Pretty stars Gavin Casalegno, Lola Tung and Christopher Briney (Erika Doss/Amazon Prime Video)

Han also seized the opportunity to take the show’s visual language in new directions — “luckily I’m the showrunner, so all the rules go out the window when it’s my turn,” she jokes — so that viewers could see the world, and Belly, as Conrad does, “to really feel the love he feels for her, visually but with the music as well,” she says. The result is beautifully filmed close-ups of Lola Tung as Belly, but also some vintage needle drops (tracks by Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrison and Otis Redding) that are a welcome twist for a show known best for its extensive use of Taylor Swift.

Just after the final episode of the series aired on Sept. 17, Han revealed that a Summer I Turned Pretty movie is in the works. She didn’t spill too many details in our conversation, but if you want to parse it for clues, well, you’ll have to listen! The episode also includes my recap of Sunday night’s Governors Awards alongside Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Ford, who joined me to indulge in the best people-watching of the year and speculate about who came out of the evening with the best Oscar buzz boost. (Hint: It wasn’t Timothée Chalamet, who was a mystifying no-show.)

Thanks to Prime Video and West Hollywood EDITION for making this live podcast taping possible (watch our chat here!), and of course, thanks to Jenny Han for joining. Stay tuned — more live Prestige Junkie recordings are on the way!