Tegan and Sara Quin's 'High School' Is a Tender Ode to Coming of Age and Coming Out (2024)

“Tegan and Sara? It doesn’t even rhyme. Your parents blew it,” a classmate of identical twins Tegan and Sara Quin jests at the end of the pilot of High School, a new series on Amazon Freevee. Their names, viewers come to find, are just one of the many ways the teenagers attempt to distinguish themselves from the tropes commonly attributed to twins.

Based on the indie pop duo’s 2019 best-selling memoir of the same name, the show, which premieres on October 14, is a tender coming-of-age tale that recounts how the sisters (portrayed by newcomers Railey and Seazynn Gilliland) went to great pains to achieve individuality while in high school in Calgary, Canada, in the mid-’90s. Though they eventually come to realize that they’re a lot more alike than they want to admit, the teenagers are hell-bent on proving their singular identities outside of being twins. This, while also surviving high school, navigating queerness, and managing an atypical divorced-family dynamic.

Directed by actress, writer, producer Clea DuVall, who is also a close friend of the Quins, High School gives viewers an inside look at what Tegan’s and Sara’s lives were like before they became Tegan and Sara. As the show’s first season develops, so do the twins’ shared interest in creating the kind of music that breaks barriers and brings people across time and space together—including one another.

The Quins and DuVall recently connected over Zoom to speak with BAZAAR.com about what they learned about themselves while creating High School, the importance of seeing people as individuals, and coming to terms with being queer in the mid-’90s.

Tegan and Sara, high school can be a time most people want to forget, but you both decided to revisit that era not just once, for your shared memoir, but twice, with this new series. What was it like to relive those formative moments that helped shape who you both are now?

Tegan Quin: I think for Sara and I, it was cathartic to go back and revisit that time. I realized what a creative time it was—you’re just kind of bubbling over with curiosity—and I think as adults, we kind of write off young people and are obsessed with, “I hate the way I looked in high school,” “I was such a loser,” “Everything I made was junk and garbage.” The journey of spending two years in a high school mindset made me realize that wasn’t how we were. We were alive and vibrant and full of emotion, and it was really nice to walk away with more respect and compassion for my younger self and to heal that misunderstanding with myself. I think that’s probably what motivated us to want to continue to tell that story, but this time with Clea at the helm.

Clea, why was Tegan and Sara’s story one that you believe needed to be captured on the screen?

Clea DuVall: I was so moved by their book. It really was the first time I had ever encountered anything that I really personally connected to in terms of a coming-of-age story and what my experience in high school was like.

They just did such a beautiful job. I immediately felt like it would make such a beautiful television show. Also, having the luxury of knowing them both, and knowing the people in their lives, I knew how expansive their world was and that we could not only tell their story, but expand it to include other people's perspectives. When Tegan and Sara were writing their memoir, they were obviously writing about their experience and they weren't able to go outside of that, but the show could.

A major theme in the memoir and in the series is that friendship in sisterhood didn’t always come easy for you both, despite being twins and facing similar personal challenges. Why was it important to everyone involved to showcase the complications of sisterhood in this series?

Sara Quin: In some ways, being a twin was, like, my first shame. I know that sounds really negative, but I felt all these complicated feelings figuring out I was gay, but in a way, figuring out I was a twin in the world was also a kind of coming out. Like, I was born into being a twin, but at some point, I had to have a cognitive recognition, like, “Wow, the world sees me like this, and I feel differently than the way the world sees me.”

In the early part of our [musical] career, we really publicly resisted talking about our sister relationship and, specifically, really resisted talking about ourselves as twins. Nobody was mature enough to have that conversation. It was like, “So do y’all read each other’s minds and feel each other’s feelings?” Writing the memoir, and now seeing it developed into the show, is an opportunity to show how textured and complex being a sibling is and also [to explore what it was like] being twins and sharing this queer identity and then, eventually, this artistic identity. I’d love to hear Clea talk more about how she wanted to represent that in the show, but I was just so grateful that she wanted to individualize us so clearly, because being a twin can feel like you’re interchangeable to most people.

CD: My relationships with you guys are so individual; I have actually spent more time with you as individuals than I have with you together. You are not interchangeable to me in any way, and you’re just so yourselves. You being twins is almost like an afterthought. Reading your book and getting more insight on that experience was really illuminating as your friend. I'm an only child so I don't know; it seems great to have a sister, but there is the part of it that is kind of a shared burden that you carry. Your dynamic is so interesting and so beautifully told through your memoir and being able to explore that further in the show … it's just a natural dynamic, so it's ripe for story. I have never seen anything like it before.

Sara and Tegan, your mother is a prominent character in the show, played by Cobie Smulders, and her storyline really shows the emotional labor that comes along with being a working, single mom. Why was giving her character her own time to shine also vital to the series?

CD: Tegan and Sara are fascinating, but the people in their lives are as well. Knowing their mother … her story is so interesting. I mean, she was 22 years old and had twin girls that she was raising on her own while having this nonconventional relationship with Tegan and Sara’s stepdad. She was a character whose life was as interesting and nuanced as Tegan and Sara, and knowing her story just makes theirs more complete.

TQ: It's so interesting because we associate divorce and broken homes with tragedy, and my mom was actually so strong and so powerful, and went back to school and had this badass boyfriend who lived with us and was a good dad. My mom and [biological] dad are friends, and they co-parented together, and there was no conflict between my dad and my stepdad. They were very unconventional, and recently, some of the friends that were around us in high school were like, “We didn’t know it was that unconventional; that is why we looked up to your mom and we looked up to you guys.”

Usually, when we see single moms and working moms, it’s all tragedy, but I think there’s something about Cobie’s portrayal that does capture what my mom was like. She’s dope. She was badass. She loved music. She dressed cool. All her friends wanted to be like her. She really learned about us throughout high school and by the end really embedded in our world and got to know us. At the beginning of adolescence, she wasn't repelled by us, and I think a lot of parents ignore teenagers. I think it's such a cool opportunity to tell a less conventional story about divorce and parenting.

The show’s soundtrack immediately transports you back to the ’90s. Were there any songs you had to fight for clearance for to ensure they were included as part of the show’s overall story?

CD: Because Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins were such a huge part of Tegan and Sara’s musical influence, it was really important to make sure we got those bands, and they were not easy to get. There were things that we could not get that we wanted to get, but we were still able to use so much of the music that influenced them, and I feel so very lucky for that.

SQ: From a business perspective, we’ve always been on the other side of the publishing and placement game. We’re the ones that are looking for replacements. We’re the ones that are looking at pitches and deciding do we want to let Janice from Milwaukee use our song in her student film for $400 or whatever. So it was really interesting, the first time I saw the spreadsheet for how much the songs that we wanted cost. I was like, “Wow, Nirvana is a little more expensive than Tegan and Sara!”

Being queer in the late ’90s was ultimately a very different scenario than being queer now. What were some of the nuances you wanted to showcase about someone figuring out their identity at such a pivotal time culturally in the world.

TQ: People cannot believe how parents weren’t even suspicious of friends that wanted to sleep in your bed all of the time in the ’90s. The experience of getting to have sex with your girlfriend at your childhood home is something that happens for a lot of people in college, but, like, my mom never was like, “Are you sure you want to have Crystal sleep over again?” She was just totally for it. Now I feel like … are sleepovers even allowed? Clea, you’re raising a teenager.

CD: Yeah, sleepovers are allowed but not with COVID. I think coming of age and coming out is such a quiet internal experience, and it is so nuanced. Being able to really capture that via alternating perspectives really allows the audience to be in on how internal that experience really is.

In the ’90s—even though people are doing drugs and having sex and whatever—there was still an innocence to it and a lack of cynicism. Now there's so much vocabulary around so many things, especially sexuality. Even the concept of asking someone how they identify—much less what pronouns they use—didn't exist back then. It was this new territory where you really had to figure it out on your own, and it was a lot of processing.

SQ: The other thing that the show does is capture how being an adolescent is so awkward and uncomfortable, yet you're just full of so much attraction and so many feelings. The show doesn't ever take advantage of that. It doesn't pervert young sexuality in a way that makes it feel like young people would be watching for the wrong reasons, or old people would be watching for the wrong reasons. I think that Clea handled that so beautifully. There's so much longing, and that's what being a teenager is like: longing for everyone and everything, longing for more junk food, longing for more drugs, longing to get out of school, longing for your friends, longing for the girls you like, longing to be on the phone longer. All of it.

I think what it does is capture those awkward uncomfortable moments. Sex and sexuality are very uncomfortable things to talk about when you're young—and they're still uncomfortable for me as an adult—so I liked that there aren't too many conversations about it. Instead, you are literally just watching people perform that awkwardness, and it's so cool to see it done.

What was the biggest takeaway from creating the series? Was there anything you ultimately learned about yourselves?

TQ: I had a revelation today. Sarah and I have collaborated on music since we were 15. To make albums, you need engineers, producers, record companies, and managers. Ultimately, every day involves some sort of compromise. I think probably one of the biggest takeaways from this process—and one of the biggest gifts, at least for me—is to see how other people collaborate, to collaborate with somebody that isn't Sara, and to learn and be taught and just trust that somebody else is able to tell part of our story.

We didn't try to just make a TV show about our lives. We put this into Clea's hands, and she wasn't just a random person that we respected. She was also our friend. We spent so many years fighting to tell our own story, that it sometimes felt counterintuitive to be like, “Now you tell our story.” It’s not just our story. It’s a story, and it's the story of adolescence. It was just such a cool process to, like, let go and be able to do that.

CD: I really connect with so much of what you said. I think when you're working with people who you're so close to, who know you so well in a certain context, then expanding that and introducing a new element to your relationship is really humbling. When you're a creative person, whenever you're making anything, it is terrifying and you're just like, "I don't want to fail," and it's very exposing. But then, when you're doing that and experiencing all of those feelings that are not always the most comfortable and you're doing that with people who you love so much, there’s this extra layer of intimacy. There’s this extra layer of vulnerability, and it’s very comforting.

Tegan and Sara have been so generous. I was so scared to mess it up. They have written this beautiful book and what they have created is pretty revolutionary. I just felt so grateful that they trusted me to do this and sat through the uncomfortable moments and the difficult conversations.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.