Jacob Tierney talks about “boring” and “fuck you” meaning “I love you” for Shane and Ilya:
“A really good friend of mine—a person who reads my scripts who's a brilliant novelist named Rainbow Rowell—she read the first episode and she said to me… “just remember that every ‘fuck you’ is ‘I love you,’ and maybe you're saying ‘fuck you’ too many times”
“And I was like oh, that's such a good call. That's a great call. Because it was just a reminder of all of the things they say to each other that are not ‘I love you’ and that are not—”
“Boring, you know, when Ilya calls Shane boring, he's saying he's in love with him. And he's not boring, [Ilya] is endlessly fascinated by Shane. And the only way he can communicate that is by making fun of him and calling him boring, because anything else would rip his soul out through his face.”
“Like that's the idea, and so even the words we use to obfuscate matter, you know?”
(via live Q&A with Stage 32 on March 24, 2026)
Casually mentioned that rainbow is his frien. What a pair that is.
