“Every so often, if you’re paying attention, the universe delivers something unexpected. Call it destiny or fate, it’s one unique moment that just might change everything. That is, if you let it…”
Griffin Reed
Things are about to get complicated for Margot Hayes (Emma Roberts) and Griffin Reed (Thomas Mann).
With Christmas in her taillights and her sister’s (Britt Robertson) New Year’s Eve wedding fast approaching, Margot has convinced her boyfriend – the drop-dead-gorgeous (and narcissist supreme), Kip Prescott (Lewis Tan) – is about to pop the question. No matter that they’ve only been together three months. No matter that her reliably blunt mother, Judy (Cheryl Hines) – who, like the rest of the family, has yet even to meet Kip – thinks Margot is simply setting herself up for (another) disappointment. Yet she heads to dinner to meet her beau and is ready to say “YES, YES, YES”.
But as fate would have it, at the same restaurant is where Griffin Reed is planning to propose to the woman of his dreams, the drop-dead-gorgeous nightmare, Clementine, online influencer and local model (she’s the Fletcher’s Mattress Girl and the Muffin Land Bakery Queen), that very same night; New Year’s Eve-Eve being the date his overprotective mother (Wendie Malick) said, ‘I do,’ to Griffin’s dad.
Of course, things go anything but according to plan that evening. And with their respective dubious relationships going awry, it’s ultimately down to Margot and Griffin, two perfect strangers – and two perfect soulmates are thrown together by fate – to see what’s staring them in the face… Namely, each other.
“They felt right together,” says director Marius Vaysberg, of the palpable big-screen chemistry between leads Emma Roberts and Thomas Mann in About Fate, which was filmed in and around Boston last summer over the course of 26-days.“There’s this simplicity and humanity about both of them that they connect in a way,” explains the director. “Because of the pandemic, it was hard for the three of us to meet [before filming], so it was a risk that I had to take. But it felt like it was going to work. And it sure as hell clicked as soon as the three of us met in Boston.”
The secret to a brilliant romantic comedy is simple enough, according to screenwriter Tiffany Paulsen, here marking her first collaboration with Marius Vaysberg and her third with Emma Roberts.“You have to want the couple to kiss,” she says with a gracious tip of the hat to her About Fate director for bringing that final element to the screen. “Marius is genuinely one of the loveliest people I’ve ever worked with,” says Paulsen. “He brings a unique warmth, humor and openness that I’ve never experienced with a director. He absolutely knows what he’s doing and what he wants, but has no ego in being open to ideas… I loved working with Marius.”
