Troye Sivan is a leading man in music, and now a leading man on the big screen. He commands the screen in the new film Three Months, which is available on Paramount+ now. The movie follows Caleb, a South Florida teen who finds out he’s been exposed to HIV on the eve of his high school graduation. He has to wait three months for his results. During this waiting period, Caleb’s bonds with his childhood best friend and new pal, Dara and Estha, evolve. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with the cast about whether or not they saw shades of themselves in the characters they played.
“I definitely saw a lot of myself in Caleb,” Troye told HollywoodLife. “I think the things that excited me were the things that felt different from myself. But at the core of it, I really, really, really grew to care about Caleb. Anytime I needed to pull from some sort of emotional place in the movie, it was not me trying to kind of like put myself in his shoes. It was me imagining Caleb as a real person and just how much I would kind of care for him. I’m 26. Caleb’s 17. I think if I was to meet him, I think I’d be able to see through his kind of tough exterior and really, really, really be like, ‘Damn, I really want this kid to succeed. I’m so sorry, that you’re going through what you’re going through.’ I just had a lot of empathy for him. I think that really, really, really drew me to want to be a part of this movie.”
Brianne Tju, who played Dara, noted that she “related a lot” to Dara. “I haven’t been 17-18 in a while, but even now I realized someone said something in one of our interviews earlier that coming of age is kind of a genre or an experience a time in your life that’s like never-ending,” she continued. “It’s not really just for young people. I feel that now and just Dara’s level of wanting to be loved and kind of getting that love from other sources, whether it be this affair she’s having with her boss or from her best friend, she feels that she needs to cater to other people in order to be loved. In a way, I kind of related to that. I think a lot of people do, especially when we’re young, but I understood her level of love for her best friend and the unconditional nature of it.”
Viveik Kalra, who starred as Estha, added, “For me, it was just acting. I think we’re incredibly dissimilar. There are so many things that everything seems to be far away from me, and perhaps close to me in ways that I don’t or can’t comprehend right now. But maybe in a couple years time, I look back and go actually, maybe that was similar in that way. But it’s so, so, so far away from me in terms of Estha and his whole sort of slightly odd, awkward vibe. I guess you could say this slightly odd, awkward vibe is still here with me, but who knows?”
Troye also wrote two original songs for Three Months: “Wait” and “Trouble.” The singer opened up about the process of bringing these songs to life.
“The music was a really important part of the whole process. The first time I met Jared [Frieder] was at a party. I remember the first thing we spoke about was Little Mix, the British girl group. And I was like, ‘Oh, this guy like loves pop music, maybe even more than I do.’ We spoke about Taylor Swift and stuff. During filming, our text chain was just constant Spotify links back and forth, and then I wrote the songs after we had wrapped. I actually had some rough edits of scenes that I took into the studio with me and wrote from Caleb’s perspective while watching scenes from the movie.”