Lola Tung will star in a sapphic soccer rom-com Heated Rivalry, step aside
She can play the girl-next-door, cover herself in blood for magical rituals, and now she’s ready to dribble past every opponent: we are obviously talking about Lola Tung and her fast-rising career. The American actress was recently spotted aboard a boat alongside the cast of The Summer I Turned Pretty, filming the first scenes of the highly anticipated movie that will mark the final chapter of the saga. Just moments earlier we saw her wearing an elegant long dress at Cousins Beach, but now our Belly is wiping sweat away with the hem of a football jersey. A week ago, a short teaser video was released on the Instagram profile “ripe__xoxo” to announce a new movie that will introduce us to a whole new side of Lola.
Everything you need to know about Ripe!, a sapphic rom-com
After Forbidden Fruits, it’s now time for Ripe!, a film based on a short movie created by former U.S. women’s national team star Kelley O’Hara. The football player had previously shared videos featuring Lola Tung, showing the two training together and sparking fans’ curiosity... curiosity that now finally has an answer. The short film, which won the award for Best Narrative Short at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, tells the story of an American exchange student who moves to Spain and falls in love with a rival on the football field. The plot gives us plenty of hope, as it aims to fill a gap in the film industry when it comes to the representation of sapphic love in the world of football and professional sports.
The LGBTQ+ community is rewriting the rules of the game
The growing fascination that cinema and TV have with the world of sports is undeniable. Just think about the huge success of films like Challengers by Guadagnino or Marty Supreme by Josh Safdie. The playing field becomes a metaphor for life itself, while relationships turn into rules, strategies, and matches that audiences follow with the same intensity as football fans in a stadium. The real turning point comes with the representation of LGBTQ+ stories in sports narratives. Until a few years ago, cinema focused almost exclusively on the drama of secrecy or the pain of exclusion, a perfect example being Beautiful Thing from 1996. Today, the record-breaking success of Heated Rivalry, the HBO Max series starring Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, suggests that something is changing. In this new wave, queer love and label-free relationships are no longer subtext: they are the beating heart of stories that celebrate the body, identity, and competition.
This is not just happening in the U.S. Europe is also making space for queer stories in sports, as we saw with the athletes at the center of the Spanish Netflix series Olympo. The success of novels like Cleat Cute, along with the global rise of sports-themed fanfiction, has shown producers that there is a strong audience for these stories — and that it deserves to be heard. Women’s football deserves to deliver cult classics like Bend It Like Beckham once again. Beyond Ripe!, we already know that Emily Bader will suit up for 99ers, a Netflix movie set to be released later this year. The film celebrates the U.S. women’s national football team and its nail-biting 1999 World Cup victory against China, a date that holds an iconic place in sports history. We still don’t know when Ripe! will officially be released, but we are already ready to cheer for this new era of rom-coms.
