Earlier this year, Hulu released a movie called Fire Island, written by and starring Joel Kim Booster. It’s about a group of gay friends, but it was also inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Booster said he wouldn’t mind making a whole Jane Austen gay universe.
In a recent interview with IndieWire, Booster revealed that he’d love to adapt more Jane Austen books into gay movies. Like a lot. So much so that he’s pretty much always thinking about it.
“I love adaptation. Every time I read a Jane Austen book, I’m always like, ‘Oh, how can we make this gay?’ It’s just the way my brain is broken,” he said. That broken brain is apparently why he decided to do Fire Island in the first place:
“One of the reasons I wrote this movie in the first place is it’s a fun thought exercise to be like, ‘What are all the parallels? How can I make Wickham a modern day gay man? What is the calculus that’s going into these things?’”
However, this doesn’t mean we’re about to get 15 gay Jane Austen movies. Booster said he needs to “try other things” before he comes back to the material, but that doesn’t mean it’s “off the table.”
Another inspiration for the film was Clueless, according to Variety, which was an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. He said the way women treated each other in that mirrors how gay men treat each other.
“I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched ‘Clueless,’ from a time before I even understood most of the jokes,” he said. “Jane Austen’s observations about the way people are awful to each other without being awful to each other — I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is shade. This is what gay men do all the time.’”
Fire Island is streaming on Hulu.