Twins playing music’s Tegan and Sara revisit ‘High School’
High School, on Friday, Freevee
To play a famous set of twins, it takes another set of twins, at least in the case of “High School.”
Platinum recording artists Tegan and Sara Quin wrote a bestselling coming-of-age memoir now adapted into a Freevee series that begins streaming with four episodes Friday, Oct. 14 (with the four remaining episodes then debuting over the consequent two Fridays). Premiered at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival, the show casts Railey and Seazynn Gilliland as the teenage Tegan and Sara, with Cobie Smulders (“How I Met Your Mother”) and Kyle Bornheimer (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) as their parents.
“It’s very surreal, very nerve-wracking,” the real Tegan says of dramatizing her and Sara’s lives. “We’re definitely preparing our family and friends for this next part of the journey. When we wrote our memoir a few years ago, we set out to do something that we thought was really important ... which was to tell a story about queer women, and specifically about music and coming out and adolescence, in a way that was really smart and intelligent.”
Tegan credits actress Clea DuVall — a “High School” executive producer, writer and director — with making the Quin twins comfortable with translating “High School” to film: “Clea and Sara and I have been friends for a long time, and when she approached us about turning the memoir into a TV show, Sara and I just felt reassured right away that somebody who cared about us and our family and friends was at the helm.”
Railey Gilliland maintains making the series “wasn’t easy in the slightest, but getting to hang out with Tegan and Sara and getting to know them made that just slightly easier. Their stories are relatable to Seazynn and me. And we just had a lot of fun.”
Adds Seazynn Gilliland, “I think that there was a responsibility, but it was only the best kind of responsibility. I’ve never seen anything like this on screen before. When I was 15 myself, I would have loved to see something like this. I think it’s really important to show, and I was able to be the one to show that. So that was nice.”
Despite the success she and Tegan have enjoyed, Sara Quin says of early tunes they wrote and performed, “We had decided that all of the music was bad. It’s actually been the support of people around us who’ve reassured us that the music is strong enough to be a focal point on the show. I think it just sort of shows that young people can do amazing things, right even out of the gate before they’ve had years of training and experience. Sometimes, our first instinct is our best instinct.”