The Real Reason Why Challengers’ Mike Faist Is So Private About His Relationship Status
Lea Veloso
He’s starring in 2024’s steamiest erotic tennis thriller film and many viewers might be wondering if Mike Faist is gay after that kiss. He’s a rising star and might be the next white boy of the month, garnering lots of praise over his performance of Art in Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers alongside Zendaya and Josh O’Connor.
Spoilers ahead for Challengers! If you watched just the trailer of the long-awaited movie, you’ve seen that spicy scene where Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Faist), and Patrick (O’Connor) gather in a hotel room and share a three-way kiss. Then, Tashi sits back while the other two continue. The interesting thing is that the kiss wasn’t in the early version of the script. “It wasn’t,” filmmaker Luca Guadagnino confirmed to the New York Times.
Related: Zendaya’s Challengers After-Party Dress is Tied Together With A Tennis Ball
During a press conference for the film, the actors explained how they were able to achieve such intimacy and chemistry. “We had a very luxuriant time six weeks prior to actually shooting. When we got to Boston, we had six weeks of training and rehearsal with Luca and Justin and Amy,” Mike Faist explained. “And just getting to know each other. And then on top of that, Josh and I would just spend any other time that we had just running lines around Boston. Just walking around. And we would just run lines. We’d go to the park. We would just walk around the city and we would just run the lines.”
Is Mike Faist gay?
Mike Faist hasn’t said anything about his sexual orientation. He did star in a production of Brokeback Mountain in London where he played Jack Twist opposite Lucas Hedges who played Ennis Del Mar.
In an interview with The Telegraph, he emphasized that the play was more than just a play about gay cowboys and also talked about allyship in the US. When asked about homophobia in the US, he responded, “We evolve and we don’t – that’s the sad reality, Just a few days after I flew back from my first visit to this theatre there was a shooting at a gay club in Denver.” (Five people were killed by a man who claimed he wanted to “cleanse society” of homosexuality.) “I don’t think we’ll ever get there. Not in my lifetime. But we can do better and that’s what we can hope for…”
Is Mike Faist in a relationship?
It’s not known if Mike Faist is in a relationship because he’s extremely private. In the same Telegraph interview, it’s mentioned that he was in a relationship with dancer Alexis Tilly Evans-Krueger and shared pictures together on Instagram but now he’s off social media for good.
“I don’t go on the internet, I don’t have social media,” the West Side Story star said in an interview with IndieWire. “I do a self-preservation thing, because … I think I learned my lesson a long time ago doing ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ of just not paying attention to any of those things. You [can] read into anything, but then at the end of the day, you have to go into the show that night and do it. A big part of what I do, or at least what I think works for me, is just protecting that head space and not paying attention to all of it, being just blindly ignorant to it all. I have to yell at my friends and family, ‘Don’t tell me anything. Stop contacting me about this. Please don’t.’”
What’s with the steamy scenes in Challengers?
In an interview with Variety, Zendaya explained how it’s not your typical sports movie. “It’s much deeper,” she said. “Tennis is just a metaphor for a lot of bigger shit. For power. For codependency. They’re using tennis as their device to get these things out of their system. It’s the only way they know how to communicate.”
Josh O’Connor talked about the insane chemistry that’s built from the beginning. “We were talking about one of the early scenes where Tashi comes to the hotel room and the three of them sit on the floor, which is such a teenage feeling, and I think it’s captured very well. And from that moment, the three of them are bound. That scene with the three-way kiss, and [then] Tashi is enjoying the view of them, I think that puts them all in this tornado together. The love and attraction and lust they have for each other is unanimous. The three of them are bound from the start.”
