Phoebe Dynevor revealed why she agreed to star in the romcom "Beach Read"
Phoebe Dynevor ("Bridgerton") revealed what drew her to the film version of "Beach Read, or How to Write a Book and Not Fall in Love" (Beach Read). One clear pull: the project’s writer-director, Quan Yulin.
"There are loads of reasons I'm up for this — but Yulin is a big one. She wrote the script, adapted the book and is directing it, and honestly — she knows romcoms inside out. She can reel off titles from across the years like it's nothing; her grasp of the form is wild."
The source material mattered too. Dynevor kept circling back to the characters: layered, lived-in people rather than sketches.
"Emily Henry, yeah — she's a big name in the book world. But this particular novel — Beach Read — has characters with real backstories. You can feel that history. For me, it felt nice to dip back into romantic territory; it's been a while since I got to do something like this."
The plot, as the piece tells, centers on January Andrews, a commercially successful romance author stuck in a creative slump after her dad dies. She heads to a lakeside house in Michigan to sort the estate and, maybe, figure out what comes next. There she bumps into Augustus Everett, a literary novelist she once tangled with back in college. They hatch a summer-long experiment: swap genres — write in ways they normally wouldn't — and also try to keep a strict, nervous distance. Predictably, rules and feelings don't play nicely; the experiment is more destabilizing than anyone planned.