Everything, Everything is headed to theaters tomorrow, and the diversity in the film is a HUGE deal.
Directed by Stella Meghie and adapted from Nicola Yoon’s novel (both Black women), Everything, Everything is getting millennial representation right where Hollywood usually falls short. Everything, Everything follows Maddy (Amandla Stenberg), a young woman confined to her house by illness, who falls in love with the new boy next door, Olly (Nick Robinson). And yet the film is almost unprecedented because Maddy is biracial and Olly is white. We almost never see interracial romances in film and certainly not with a Black woman at the center.
Obviously, there have been films like Get Out and Save the Last Dance and even ABC’s Scandal but with the YA genre which is currently overflowing in both the film and literature world, Black women have once again be erased. Yoon told Bustle that she wrote the book because,
“I really wanted to focus on strong female relationships, women who are there for each other. So many times teenage girls get made fun of, or people say they only care about boys or stuff like that. I didn’t want that to be a part of this book. I wanted to say, women love each other and take care of each other, and teenage girls are worth taking care of and loving.”
In Yoon’s book, Stenberg’s character is actually half-Black and half- Asian, however, for the film, her identity was shifted in keeping with Stenberg’s background. We all know that millennials tend to be more open-minded when it comes to race and diversity. In a 2012 Pew Research Center study, the numbers backed up that notion. While 43 percent of all Americans believed the rise in interracial marriages had been a good thing for society, among 18 to 29 year-olds, 61 percent approved of interracial marriage, with 93 percent favoring interracial dating.
We’re just so happy to see a film, helmed by Black women that really reflects the world around us. Everything, Everything hits theaters Friday, May 19. Will you be watching?