"I didn't write it for myself, but everyone, just Ro and Dakota both were just like, 'You wrote it for yourself,' he explains. Raiff emphatically did not want to star in Cha Cha, but Johnson and her producing partner Ro Donnelly convinced him. It's the story of a fundamentally nice guy trying to figure out what adulthood entails. As he pumps up the crowd at local Jewish coming-of-age celebrations, he repeatedly encounters a young mother named Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt).
This time he plays Andrew, a 22-year-old recent grad who stumbles into a Bar/Bat Mitzvah party starter gig when he accompanies his younger brother to a soiree.
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But even though the movie about a freshman finding his footing didn't get the celebration it might have received if there wasn't a pandemic changing plans, the word "wunderkind" started to be thrown around.Ĭha Cha Real Smooth feels like an expansion of ideas Raiff explored in Shithouse. Shithouse, which Raiff dropped out of Occidental College to complete, premiered at the online 2020 version of SXSW shortly after the onset of COVID-19. But, no, I think I just write what I know. "So I'll start to write, 'Oh, he's getting emotional.' And I think that's part of it. "As I'm writing, I usually just try to follow my feelings," Raiff says.
It feels unusual to see a young male protagonist crying in this way-not because "my boy died," as Raiff suggests during our interview at the end of a long press day-but just because life is hard sometimes. In both his latest and his debut, a college-set rom-com called Shithouse, Raiff's characters break down in sobs. Creating a profile on Seeking Arrangement, which boasts itself as the "world's largest sugar daddy dating website," practically seemed like a rite-of-passage for everyone I knew in college.Crying comes "naturally" to Cooper Raiff, the writer, director, and star of the new film Cha Cha Real Smooth, which is debuting on Apple TV+ after premiering at Sundance. Seriously, profiles on the sugar baby dating site were almost as common as Tinder or Bumble profiles. Obviously, the other, more quintessentially "college" activities - kegs, finals, and Ramen noodles, of course – are still alive and well, but combining the rising costs of student loan debt with our ever-changing attitudes about relationships and traditions means more and more millennials have gotten resourceful when it comes to planning for the future, or at least making enough extra cash to skip the Ramen.Īccording to USA Today, Google Trends shows a huge increase in interest for those seeking sugar daddies over the last few years, partially due to the rise of sugar-based dating practices on college campuses. New York City sugar baby mixers pull in some high-profile, wealthy attendees as well as young, attractive women seeking older counterparts. But not every sugar baby is the stereotypically "hot girl" and in fact, the phenomenon has led to filling Seeking Arrangement with over 3.25 million active members, of varying sexualities and gender identities, in the United States alone. One of those sugar babies is Kyle.Ģ2-year-old Kyle's experience as a sugar baby was a long-lasting one, but it actually began in a very casual way. "It not only allowed me to explore my sexuality through the means of doing things I would have never tried otherwise … I also believe that without certain daddies I wouldn't have survived in this city as long as I did until I could become financially independent," he said. "One daddy, in particular, was always keen on only providing financial resources through tangible stuff - buying new clothes for work, paying for college art supplies," he said," but doing it to the most - Banana Republic shirts, even though I'm a server and would ruin them." "Something I realized later was that I did become financially dependent on this income for some time." He told INSIDER that he was sometimes paid in objects like clothes, or would even have the daddies pay his rent. His work as a sugar baby meant that Kyle didn't have to worry about bills any longer.