Why It’s So Hard to Make a Great Movie About Tennis

Boxing’s close-quarter combat has yielded classics like Raging Bull, Rocky, and Creed. Baseball lovers have home runs including Bull Durham, A League of Their Own, and The Natural. Ballers have found inspiration in Hoosiers, He Got Game, and White Men Can’t Jump.

Yet somehow, tennis—whose back-and-forth, tit-for-tat gameplay has often been used as a metaphor for the give-and-take nature of acting—has inspired few, if any, great movies.

Why? “More often than not, tennis hasn’t looked good” onscreen, says Brad Gilbert, Olympic bronze medallist who now works as both an ESPN commentator and the current coach of reigning US Open champion, Coco Gauff. “It’s kind of been an afterthought. Tennis is a little harder to choreograph and script than some other sports.”

Gilbert had his work cut out for him as the consultant on Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, which stars Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in a steamy love triangle that comes to a head in the final of an ATP Challenger event—akin to the minor leagues of tennis. But under his tutelage, the movie bucks the trend for tennis films, joining King Richard and Battle of the Sexes as some of the only ones to capture the sport convincingly and authentically.

As Gilbert explains, most sports can be convincingly fudged for the big screen. There are only so many ways, for instance, that one can swim freestyle, throw a punch, kick a soccer ball, or shoot a basket. But tennis requires hand-eye coordination and a comfort with swift, lateral movement that can take years, if not decades, to fully master.

“In a real, live match, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Nothing is scripted. This is a little bit different…. You know exactly how the point is going to start and how it’s going to finish,” Gilbert explains. While it may be possible to digitally stitch an actor’s face onto a body double, nobody can fake a full swing itself. “You have to practice the sequence being exactly the same so you could replicate it—so you could do 25 takes of it.”

That, in short, is why tennis is so hard to capture on film. If a tennis movie doesn’t plan out the rallies well in advance, it’s nearly impossible for an actor to replicate the movements of a professional player. But if the actors anticipate each shot too quickly, the audience can usually tell that they knew where the ball was going. Actors must strike a delicate balance between automating their movements and believably reacting to their opponents.

“If you think about it too much, it doesn’t look authentic,” says Saniyya Sidney, who plays a young Venus Williams in King Richard. Like the stars of Challengers, she practiced a lot without a ball—but there were times when she would have to make contact with her swings.

After learning the fundamentals of the sport during six months of training, it was easier for Sidney to respond “as Venus,” she says. “It felt like I was more in the headspace of an athlete versus being an actor trying to learn the sport.”

The individual nature of tennis is dramatically exciting: “You’re watching a person out there on an island of their own doubts, trying to convince themselves to stay in it,” says FBI and Six Feet Under actor Jeremy Sisto, who cowrote and starred in the 2014 tennis comedy film Break Point.

But that very quality also makes visual storytelling tricky. In singles, “it’s just those two players that you’re covering” with the camera, says Valerie Faris, who directed Battle of the Sexes with her husband, Jonathan Dayton. It can be difficult to find a variety of ways to capture the same set of serves, groundstrokes, and volleys. “Basketball is easier in some ways because there’s so much activity. But [in tennis,] you’re forced to do a lot of cutting into these tight shots of swings.”

Despite being played and watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world, tennis also has a number of head-scratching rules that can alienate newcomers to the sport. “We may have a large percentage of our audience who don’t even know how tennis is played and scored and what the terminology is,” Dayton says. To bridge this gap, Battle of the Sexes used real-life commentators to narrate matches, tailoring their insights for a casual audience while offering a few deeper nuggets for more knowledgeable viewers.

Being a tennis fan isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to make a good film about the sport. Like Guadagnino, director Reinaldo Marcus Green had little knowledge of tennis going into King Richard—which he saw as an asset, since it helped him serve as an audience surrogate.

“In the early iterations of the draft, it was just tennis, and I was like, ‘Well, what are we learning about this match? What does this match teach us about our characters?’ Otherwise, you’re just kind of shooting back and forth,” Green says. With King Richard, he tried to keep things simple: Audiences only really care about the broad strokes, and not the exact plays of a match. “Any novice is just like, ‘Oh, 40-30, so that person must be winning. She misses a shot, so she must be losing.’” It was more important to him to focus on what each specific moment meant in the context of the entire narrative. “Tennis is the device, but that’s not what the movie’s about,” he says.

Challengers understands the last point better than many of its predecessors. Tennis doesn’t build character; it reveals character. Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a former prodigy, finds herself caught between two childhood best friends: Faist’s Art Donaldson and O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig, whose different playing styles reveal the kinds of romantic partners they will make. Art naturally retreats and plays more percentage tennis from the back of the court, waiting until Patrick makes a mistake so that he can claim the point (and eventually, the win). Patrick is much more aggressive, making impulsive decisions and looking to assert his dominance against Art.

The Challengers actors got themselves in professional tennis shape using Gilbert’s training regime. He worked with Zendaya in Los Angeles and Malibu for seven weeks, while Faist studied with a dedicated trainer in Columbus. (O’Connor was filming La Chimera in a remote Italian town at the time, which limited his training options.)

Once they arrived in Boston, the actors spent another six weeks working toward their own individual goals: Faist bulked up, O’Connor slimmed down, Zendaya’s arms became “more cut.” Their characters’ playing styles matched their builds. Tashi was modeled after taller, thinner players like Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, and Elena Rybakina. Art was patterned after Roger Federer and Pete Sampras, with a big serve and one-handed backhand. Gilbert describes Patrick as a “poor man’s [Nick] Kyrgios,” with a baffling, abbreviated serve motion that plays into a big plot twist in the final act.

Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes had scripted how each point would end. But with some input from Guadagnino, Gilbert was the one who wrote out a play-by-play for each point. Gilbert and other pros taught the actors how to play as if it were a dance or a stunt, helping them memorize each point; they didn’t have to worry about hitting the ball, which could be added in post-production. (Zendaya, according to Gilbert, got so good at mirroring her stunt double’s movements on the practice court that many of her actual crosscourt forehand swings made it into the film.)

Off the court, tennis fans—and especially players—can tell when details are fudged to better serve the plot. But Challengers is stuffed with references that will ring true to aficionados. The players on the Challenger circuit who are struggling to make ends meet and often living out of cars or motels; the real ball kids, line judges, commentators, and posters of former champions; the McEnroe-esque outbursts about bad calls; the racquet smashes that end in code violation warnings and occasionally point penalties; even the Applebee’s-esque establishment where Tashi and Art have dinner in Cincinnati, one of the major stops on the US summer swing of the yearlong world tour, ring true.

While tennis is considered a global sport, Green still sees it as a fairly niche one. “I think by virtue of the sport itself, there’s an exclusivity to [it]. It’s not as inviting to, let’s say, certain communities,” he says. Tennis is still most often played in predominantly white country clubs. “Venus and Serena are anomalies. They played on these [public] courts that had cracks in them, and they were free courts. But tennis court time is a lot of money. I think that alone makes the sport feel like that’s something that we’re never going to understand or never really get close to.”

But Challengers is arguably the closest that the sport has gotten to reaching a more mainstream audience in decades. Following its $15-million opening weekend, the film’s commercial success could very well usher in a new era of tennis projects. Back in 2020, reports surfaced about the development of an Arthur Ashe biopic. A year later, a documentary about Ashe, titled Citizen Ashe, debuted to critical acclaim. Most recently, Deadline reported that Iranian actor Amir Jadidi has been tapped to play Mansour Bahrami, most famous for his trick shots in exhibition matches, in a new French biopic.

Having dramatized some of the Williams sisters’ earliest matches, Green thinks the cutthroat world of junior tennis could be ripe for exploration in a series. Gilbert, who has already heard about “a couple other tennis movies” in the works, thinks it could only be a matter of time until a filmmaker adapts his former charge Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open. By taking advantage of the inherent theatrics of the sport, any future tennis projects can serve an ace rather than another double fault—as long as they’ve got the right coach.

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