Hayley Kiyoko’s Feature Film ‘Girls Like Girls’ Took a Decade to Make. Now That It’s Here, She Hopes It’s Just the…

“Girls Like Girls” has been a long time in the making.

Originally released as a music video in 2015 by musician Hayley Kiyoko, the tune with the lyrics “Girls like girls, just like boys do” quickly became a sapphic anthem, amassing 163 million views on YouTube to date.

“After we released the music video, I saw thousands of comments from fans saying, ‘I wish I could go see a film like this. I thought to myself: I’ve never been able to see a movie like this before,” Kiyoko tells Variety. “It planted this seed, and it’s been an extreme challenge of 10 years convincing the industry and the world that our voice matters; that being a queer woman of color is not niche, it is mainstream. There are millions of us, and we deserve to have stories that we can count beyond just our two hands.”

Kiyoko’s feature film, which opens in theaters nationwide on June 19, is an expansion of the music video of the same name. “Girls Like Girls” follows Coley (Maya Da Costa), a teenager who finds herself falling for her best friend, Sonya (Myra Molloy). After meeting through a chance encounter, the two grow closer, exchanging IM’s and hanging out in every spare moment, eventually sharing a kiss after Coley opens up about her dead mother. Unable to deal with her growing feelings for Coley, Sonya (who also has a boyfriend) starts pushing Coley away, leaving the latter to navigate her growing pains alone.

Coley regains her footing with the help of her father (Zach Braff) and begins working at a restaurant, where she runs into Sonya after months of silence. The two finally tackle the elephant in the room, with Sonya admitting she wants to be with Coley but still views it as “wrong,” much to Coley’s distress. The tense, tear-filled scene is also the first one Da Costa and Molloy performed together after Kiyoko brought the pair back for a chemistry read.

“There was this moment where I forgot that I was in the room and I thought I was watching the movie,” Kiyoko recalls, adding that she felt supported by her studio to cast two actors of Asian descent. “I remember thinking: They’re the ones. This is the movie I’m going to be watching.”

For Kiyoko, who is Japanese American, seeing herself represented onscreen was non-negotiable. The story of “Girls Like Girls” is based on Kiyoko’s own experiences, down to being set in the year 2006. “You can’t control losing a location, having to pivot or cut a day of shooting. What you can control is making sure that it feels real and authentic,” she says. “If I didn’t connect to it, then we had to adjust or shift to make sure that I saw myself in this story, and I had to trust that my experience would be able to resonate with other people.”

Kiyoko originally began fleshing out the girls from the music video for her 2023 novel (also titled “Girls Like Girls”), on which the film is loosely based. When it was time to figure out Coley as a character, Kiyoko once again turned to a source close to her: Her mother. One of film’s saddest lines comes during Coley’s period of solitude, where she tells Braff’s character that her mother died without ever really knowing her.

“My mom lost her mom when she was really young, and I always empathize with the fact that had she been queer, what that would have been like to never really know her full self,” explains Kiyoko. “Being queer is not our entire personality, but it’s a huge part of who we are. There are so many of us who aren’t accepted by family and are searching for their chosen family; it’s really hard to process the fact that so many people are conditioned to have their love be conditional, and to not want to know all of us.”

Coley is an easy character to sympathize with. Young, new to town, and inching out of the closet slowly isn’t an easy feat for anyone, especially if said move is due to the recent death of a parent. While it makes Sonya’s hot-and-cold behavior hard to watch, there’s something to be said about her trying desperately to figure out who she is as well.

“To be honest, it’s taken me a long time to navigate Sonya’s character and find that line of empathy, and also the messiness,” says Kiyoko. “When you’re a kid, you’re navigating things for the first time, so you’re not necessarily going to say the best things or handle it the right way. It was important for me to highlight that doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person, but there was a line of having accountability within your actions.”

Much has changed for Kiyoko in the decade since the characters of Sonya and Coley were created. When the music video first aired, Kiyoko, then 24, was terrified of coming out in such a public manner, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the only outlet that premiered the video was AOL.com. Over ten years later and now engaged, she’s become somewhat of a queer icon and has been dubbed “Lesbian Jesus” by fans.

Said fans have grown up alongside her, too. Multiple people have told Kiyoko that the “Girls Like Girls” universe helped them figure out their sexuality as young teens and pre-teens, and they are now able to buy tickets to the film with their friends and community.

There’s a certain pressure on the movie to deliver in both terms of content and box office numbers as well, one that Kiyoko feels immensely.

“Sapphic love stories aren’t told all the time. And if they are, it’s once every decade, or we don’t have a theatrical release, or we have a TV show that gets canceled after one season,” says Kiyoko. “Just as women in general, it’s harder to be able to get into those rooms. 5% of women of color directors represent the entire industry, so you’re starting a journey where there’s already a massive hill to climb, beyond what the story is going to be.”

“I feel like sapphic-led films are so behind gay male culture, and every person in the alphabet deserves to have their stories told and amplified,” adds Kiyoko when asked about the success of gay male media, which she feels gets the greenlight more frequently. With “Girls Like Girls,” the hope is it will signal to studios that there is a demand for representation, especially if done accurately.

When queer women are depicted on-screen, there’s often the problem of them being objectified or fetishized, treated as a punchline or something sensual for a man to be pleased by. “Throughout my career, people have mentioned to me how non-sexualized my stories are; how grounded and real they feel, and they always ask me why,” says Kiyoko. “It’s because I’m a woman, and I have experienced this kind of love. A lot of our representation wasn’t necessarily told through an authentic lens for so long, so that stereotype and that narrative was created from someone who had never experienced what we’ve experienced.”

It’s clear that Kiyoko is in charge of her own story – and that’s why she changed the ending.

The movie ends with a shot of the girls sitting by the pool, with Sonya’s head resting on Coley’s shoulder. When the credits begin playing, viewers who’ve seen the music video may experience some déjà vu.

In the 2015 track, Sonya’s boyfriend finds them by the pool and starts cussing them out, pushing Coley to the ground, who, in turn, punches him. It’s by far the most dramatic scene of the video, leaving a bruised and bloody but smiling Coley to bike home after sharing a kiss with Sonya.

“I tried it a couple of different ways,” Kiyoko says about figuring out her film’s conclusion. “I ended up realizing that if I did the original ending, it would have made it all about him. I didn’t want the last beat to be about him, because this story is about the girls.”

“Coley and Sonya have been on a very beautiful, long journey of continually peeling this onion down to the most authentic version of the story, which is this film,” says Kiyoko, who hopes that her next directing opportunity won’t take another decade. She aims to continue to get sapphic stories “told and seen.”

As for what happens to the girls next? It’s up to the viewer where they go from here.