“Challengers” Writer Justin Kuritzkes Breaks Down the Divisive Ending: 'Who Wins the Match Is Irrelevant' (Exclusive)

Justin Kuritzkes had an incredible 2024.

The playwright and novelist made the leap to Hollywood screenwriter when his debut film starring Zendaya, Challengers, opened to rave reviews and big box office returns in April 2024.

Just months later in November his second film, Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novella, hit theaters and immediately courted awards buzz for Daniel Craig's devastating lead performance.

Both films, directed by Kuritzkes' friend and collaborator Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), have put Los Angeles–born Kuritzkes, 34, on the map as one of the most in-demand writers in Hollywood. The duo is reportedly at work on a superhero flick for DC Studios based around the Sgt. Rock character.

As Challengers and Queer continue to dominate awards season (both films recently competed at the 2025 Golden Globes, where Challengers won for its score), PEOPLE caught up with Kuritzkes to talk about his meteoric rise.

A year ago you were a playwright. Now you've blossomed into one of the most in-demand screenwriters in Hollywood. How have you stayed grounded during this time?

First of all, that's really nice of you to say all that. I mean, I think being a playwright for 10 years really helps you stay grounded because nobody really gets to live as a playwright. Most of the playwrights I know and most of the people whose work really inspires me, and my favorite writers in New York, are all people who have day jobs. And the whole time I was a playwright, I would write on my tax returns "administrative assistant" or "SAT tutor" because that's what I was. Now I write "screenwriter," but that doesn't mean I believe that's who I am or that that's any more real than being a playwright was. I just feel a tremendous sense of gratitude that people get to watch ... people get to experience my work. That's really all you ever hope for.

Has writing for film always been your goal, or did it just come to you based on how Challengers was originated?

No, film was kind of my first love. I was honestly a fan of movies before I was a fan of anything else. But then I fell in love with theater towards the end of high school, where I started writing plays, and that kind of set me off on a path for a lot of years. But I was always watching movies and thinking about making movies. Then Challengers, when the idea presented itself to me it was just so clear that it wasn't a play or a book, because it was this image of these three people on this tennis court and the geometry between them and the way that they were looking at each other. That felt like a Spaghetti Western to me, more than something that was coming from a place of language. So I knew it had to be a movie, and then I knew I had to write it.

I read you weren't a huge fan of tennis but became one in researching for Challengers. But how did the three-way relationship, whatever you want to call it, come to you? What was that central dynamic inspired by?

Tennis is a very controlled sport, and it's very much a sport about boxes. You have to serve in one box, the ball has to stay in a couple boxes. There's all these rules about how you conduct this fight. Because that's what it is: It's a battle. And it has a relationship to boxing in that boxing is a combat sport, but boxing is all about trying to touch another person and tennis is all about trying not to touch another person. That felt really potent to me.

The other thing about tennis that lent itself to a love triangle was that there's this myth that tennis is an individual sport because you spend the whole match looking at shots of two people's faces and bodies. But then they always cut to the box and you become aware very quickly that no tennis player is out there alone in some sense. Because they have this whole support system of people who have just as much invested in the match as the players do. That started to be really interesting to me, thinking about somebody sitting in the box who couldn't play anymore, and in some sense had to find a way to play again. That's where the character of Zendaya's Tashi came from and the dynamic started to come from.

Related: Challengers Review: Zendaya Stars in a Sensational, Sexy Comedy About Love and Tennis

The structure of Challengers is so unique. Take me into your process of how you mapped it all out. Did you have Post-its all over your office to keep track of the timelines?

Yeah. I mean, I got the idea for the movie a couple of years before I actually started writing it. I was writing a book. So I got to think about the movie a lot, and starting to take notes and map things out. I knew a few things right up front, which was that the desire to write the movie in the first place came from this question I was asking myself as a tennis fan, which was, "What would make tennis even better?" The answer to that question was it would be better if I could know exactly what was at stake for everybody at every moment in the match. Already that kind of presents the structure of you're going to drop people right into a tennis match in the present day, and then gradually they'll come to realize why these people are looking at each other like this thing matters so much.

In terms of the timeline, I didn't know exactly where I was going to jump back to when, but I knew that the movie would take us roughly from when these characters were 18 up until when they were in their 30s. Because that's the lifespan of an athlete. You can think of an athletic career as a kind of mini life, and you're born when you're of legal age and they can start making money off of you, and you're dead when you're useless, when you're like 35, if you're lucky.

That was really interesting to me, especially as somebody who had just turned 30 and was a writer. Because I was thinking about what it would feel like to be my age and to already be over the hill, to already be at the end of your career. When I think about Zendaya, who's this brilliant young actress, I want to know what she's going to do when she's 70. That's so exciting to me. Or what Josh O'Connor or Mike Faist are going to do when they're 80 years old. That was really fascinating to me.

Fans of Challengers have been debating the ending since it came out. Where do you think the characters end up?

I hope this isn't a frustrating answer to you, but my thing with that really is that, by the time they're all really talking to each other at the end and all their cards are on the table, and the boys are playing the best tennis of their lives and Tashi is playing tennis in her way for the first time in years, to me, at that point I've gotten what I wanted from the movie. And the match is irrelevant. Who wins the match is irrelevant because we've moved beyond that.

What they all end up doing in their lives, I don't know. I guess it's fun for the audience to think about their own answers to that question. For me, I always like that about movies, that these characters exist when we meet them and they stop existing when the movie's over. Even if a movie imagines someone's whole life, cradle to grave, it's always this artificial container for the kind of chaos of life and human relationships. You're always only getting a little window into something much bigger. So if people want to fill in the rest, that's great. But for me, I got what I came for.

What is it about you and Luca and your collaborative process that led you to make another film together?

Luca's somebody who I had been a fan of since he's been making movies. He's somebody whose movies really mean a lot to me. So the idea of making two movies and being part of that filmography is something I still have to remind myself of the immensity of. Because a filmography is all you have as a filmmaker, and even if you make movies as fast and feverish as Luca does, you only get to do so many. So to be partially responsible for two of those movies is incredible to me.

I think, given all of that, what I was really nicely surprised by when I met him is that he just felt like one of my people. He felt like a friend I'd known a long time, and he felt like somebody who spoke the same language as me. Which means that we just didn't have to spend a lot of time explaining each other to each other. We kind of were excited by a lot of the same things in movies and we had a shorthand really quickly. The other thing that's incredible about Luca as a collaborator is that he's the rare director, and especially the rare director of his stature, who not just invites the writer to be on set but demands it. He was really this champion for me being a part of the process, which was something that Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O'Connor] and Zendaya, the other producers, were excited for too.

But Luca really insisted that, "You're going to be there with me the whole time in pre-production and in rehearsal and on set, and if anything changes in the script it's going to be you doing it." That's this incredible gift, especially to somebody who had never written a movie before and had never had a job on a film set before. Because of that, I was on set for Challengers, and one day he just gave me the book for Queer and said, "Read this tonight and tell me if you'll adapt it for me." When a person who is a filmmaker you love and a friend you love tells you to do that, you do it. So I read the book that night and I called him and I said yes, and that was it.

Can you recall a specific or memorable interaction you had with one of the actors, either on the set of Queer or Challengers? The actors must love the opportunity to go to you, the writer, to help craft their characters and answer questions.

I'll tell you a story about the actors and Luca, which is, I remember there's a scene in Challengers where Josh O'Connor is on a date at a hotel, at the Ritz-Carlton, and he doesn't realize that that's where Tashi and Art are staying, and they run into each other. I had written that scene and we got to the end of it, and the scene had officially ended when Tashi goes back up in the elevator and Josh goes back to the date and we didn't see anything else. We're sitting there and it's like 3 a.m., it's a night shoot, and Luca just kind of offhandedly says, "I think the scene could use a button." I said, "Okay," and he goes, "We're going to do a setup, it's going to take us five minutes to set up the camera, come up with something that'll make everybody in the theater laugh." And so I'm like, "Alright."

I'm thinking, "What could he do? What could he do?" Then finally it occurs to me that he should just try to kiss her, the date. So I go over to Josh and to Hailey [Gates], who plays Helen, the woman he is on the date with, and I told them, "So Josh is just going to kiss you now." Without hesitation, they were both just like, "That's great. We're doing it." And we did it in one take and it's in the movie.

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