No Hard Feelings filmmakers defend premise even though it’s just a movie, calm down

Jennifer Lawrence’s new comedy No Hard Feelings is in theaters and doing okay, which is mostly good news for the future of R-rated comedies, but The Hollywood Reporter felt the need to double-check with everyone who worked on it to make sure that they don’t actually think the film’s premise is a good idea that people should do in real life. For those who missed it, the movie stars Lawrence as a 32-year-old woman who responds to a Craigslist ad from a couple who wants someone to (ahem) “date” their shy and awkward 19-year-old son—a clearly comical premise for a sex comedy that makes it pretty clear even in the trailer that A.) the plan isn’t going to work out like that and B.) everyone is going to learn something along the way.

But won’t somebody puhlease think of the children! Luckily, THR caught up with a bunch of people at the film’s premiere last week and got multiple assurances that, no, the film is not advocating for parents to start paying adults to have sex with their teenage children (whew!). As Laura Benanti, who plays one of the parents, points out, the film is “a very satirical look at what can happen if you do not give your children a longer leash to figure things out for themselves.” Matthew Broderick, the other parents, also notes that their characters are in the wrong here, saying it’s important to let kids go off and figure out how to live their lives, but “these parents decide to mess with nature.”

The producers and writer/director Gene Stupnitsky also told THR that, even though the film is based on a real Craigslist ad, they didn’t try to track down what happened (if anything) with the real example. It’s not a movie about what would happen if this were real, it’s an exaggeration of this kind of helicopter parenting and the societal pressures of living your life a certain way. Stupnitsky also says that he’d “be surprised” if anyone came out of No Hard Feelings thinking it was creepy, explaining, “we took great pains to be careful about the ick factor” and that they tried to take a “humanist approach” to the story.

Really, it doesn’t take a ton of media literacy to see a trailer for a movie and make the assumption that it’s not ultimately going to be about how cool it is to pay someone to trick your introverted child into having sex with them—assuming that’s a concern that anyone actually had and not just something that everyone making the movie felt compelled to weigh in on, which is not a given. The point is, not everything that happens in a movie is fully endorsed by the people who made it, especially if the thing that happens is plainly ridiculous and they’re making a comedy out of the fact that it’s plainly ridiculous!