Cooper Raiff on his new AppleTV+ indie rom-com ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
Cooper Raiff on “Cha Cha Real Smooth” – FULL INTERVIEW
Cooper Raiff, the writer, director and star of Apple TV+’s new romantic dramedy “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” sat down with FOX Television Stations to chat about loving his characters, “ghost director” Dakota Johnson and more.
CHICAGO – Timing is everything. It’s a sentiment 25-year-old writer/actor/director Cooper Raiff knows all too well. His debut feature “S#!%house” switched to a virtual premiere in the early weeks of the pandemic. (“The whole experience was in my pajamas,” Raiff told FOX Television Stations of the film’s release, which won Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at the 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival). Then his sophomore feature, “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” had to swap its planned in-person premiere for a virtual one too, as the 2022 Sundance Film Festival adjusted for the Omicron variant. Still, considering they’re both earnest romantic dramedies about timing, chance and the ineffable magic of connection, maybe there’s something thematically fitting about their winding path to success.
Indeed, as in the best coming-of-age romances, everything seems to have worked out in the end. “Cha Cha Real Smooth” received glowing reviews at Sundance, won the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic category and was quickly scooped up by Apple TV+ for an impressive $15 million. Now it’s set to hit the streaming service — as well as select theaters — on June 17.
Finally seeing the film with an audience has been “so special,” Raiff told FOX Television Stations after a screening at the Chicago Critics Film Festival in May. “It’s the reason why you make movies,” Raiff explained. “To see them with people.”
Raiff stars in “Cha Cha Real Smooth” as Andrew, a 22-year-old recent college grad struggling to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He moves back home with his mom (Leslie Mann) and stepdad (Brad Garrett) and quickly falls into a makeshift job as a “party starter” at the bar and bat mitzvahs his kid brother David (Evan Assante) attends nearly every weekend. That’s where Andrew meets Domino (Dakota Johnson), a beguiling young mom with a thoughtful, autistic daughter named Lola (Vanessa Burghardt). Though Domino isn’t exactly on the market, sparks soon begin to fly between her and Andrew anyway. And “Cha Cha Real Smooth” tells a gorgeously sensitive, sneakily complex story about growing up at every stage of life.
Cooper Raiff and Dakota Johnson in “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” premiering June 17, 2022 on Apple TV+.
“Domino was the first thing that I started with,” Raiff explained of crafting the script. “The first nugget of the movie. [She’s] this mother of a disabled kid whose life has been defined by her kid’s stages — and will be forever. And it was very interesting to me to have her meet someone who was at a stage in life that she did not get to have. And for [Andrew] to give her some life and some moments of…
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/cooper-raiff-on-his-new-appletv-indie-rom-com-cha-cha-real-smooth
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