Wedding Season star Gavin Drea on awkward auditions and the inspiration behind the Disney+ drama

Virgin Radio

26 Aug 2022, 09:15

Forget everything you know about wedding season, as Disney+ is about to turn it on its head.

The genre-busting thriller tells the story of Katie (Rosa Salazar) and Stefan (Gavin Drea), who fall for each other at a wedding and begin an affair, despite Katie already being engaged.

A couple of months later, at Katie’s Wedding, her new husband and his entire family are murdered.

The police believe Stefan is behind it, but he thinks Katie did it, and no one really knows for sure what happened, leading to the star-crossed lovers going on the run, all while trying to prove their innocence.

For Gavin, he was very much thrown into the deep end when it came to all things stunts, action...and auditioning with his co-star Rosa.

Speaking exclusively to virginradio.co.uk, Gavin explained how he first met his co-star and on-screen partner in crime via Zoom, and originally thought the process would be “a disaster.”

“The only place I sort of deviate probably from Stefan is he's a very positive person,” Gavin said. “I could probably get very negative and I thought ‘this is gonna be a disaster,’ because, you know, a chemistry reading and Zoom are the two of the most opposite and polar opposite things that exist in the world."

Luckily for Gavin, the audition process was better than expected. He added: “Straight away, we were making sure to laugh and we had a really good dynamic in that meeting. And we were sort of throwing each other curve balls in the scene. We just clicked straightaway.”

Wedding Season definitely isn't your typical rom-com, with high-octane action and chase scenes coupled with a burgeoning love story, and that’s what influenced Gavin into saying yes to playing Stefan. 

“At it’s core, there's a very sincere story being told,” Gavin continued. “It’s about two people and also a group of friends that are going through that period that we all go through in our lives and our late kind of 20s, early 30s, where we're trying to figure out what our next step is, and trying to find the right person and trying to organise the right wedding and all of that. That, and reading the scripts, definitely drew me in, because that's what felt very real.”

The show was written and created by Oliver Lyttelton, who told virginradio.co.uk that he wanted to make a series that showed the realities of falling in love, warts and all!

On what inspired the series, Oliver said: “I love rom-coms, but falling in love in rom-coms, it often feels like a warm hug. It's sort of cosy and comforting. Whereas for me, falling in love has always been a process of being and feeling very sick and anxious and sweaty, and terrified. So I kind of wanted to find a way of telling a rom-com, where falling in love felt like that. It turned out the best way to do that was kind of crashing a action thriller into a romantic comedy.”

Wedding Season will premiere exclusively on the streaming service on Disney+ Day on Thursday 8 September.