Tricia Cooke was sitting in a lesbian bar called Meow Mix—or was it the Caddy Shack?—when divine inspiration struck in the form of a title: Drive-Away Dykes. Over cocktails, she and a friend were reflecting on their own spontaneous road trips. “It was fun to just grab a car and go wherever you wanted to go in the country,” she tells Vanity Fair, decades after the idea first arrived in the ’90s. “I went home and I told Ethan, ‘Mary and I were at the bar and came up with this great title for a movie.’”
“It all started with Trish sitting in a bar,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Ethan Coen, whom Cooke has been married to since 1993.
“Which, most things do,” she quips back.
So began what would become Drive-Away Dolls, a more safely titled iteration of Cooke’s barstool pitch, which is in theaters now. Margaret Qualley is a sexually liberated free spirit, who after splitting in dramatic fashion with her cop ex-girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), convinces her staunchly straightlaced best friend (Geraldine Viswanathan) into traveling with her in a fast car with a ticket to anywhere—but more specifically, a constellation of gay bars en route to Tallahassee. While on their odyssey, the dolls get tangled up in a scheme involving an unopened briefcase, a severed head, and a mob of criminals trailing them.
Although Cooke edited Coen brothers’ movies like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski, this film is her and Ethan’s first as cowriters. It also marks Ethan’s solo directorial debut; he and his brother Joel stopped making movies together after 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs for Netflix. (Ethan has suggested it’s actually more of a pause—the brothers are currently writing something together.) “I wasn’t disillusioned with the film industry, I was just kind of tired,” Coen says now. “The last couple of movies that me and Joel made were just really difficult productions. You hear about people saying they’re burnt out or whatever, it always sounds like bullshit to me, frankly. You sleep for one night and you’re fine the next morning, right? But I actually was...It’s an incredibly privileged thing to say, it’s stupid, and yet, I don’t know—it’s kind of what it felt like.”
Coen was first lured back into the director’s chair by music producer T Bone Burnett, who enlisted him and Cooke for a 2022 Jerry Lewis documentary. “I was getting bored,” he admits. “Then, since we enjoyed exploiting that opportunity, we moved on to this next one.” Drive-Away couldn’t feel further from Joel’s first solo outing, 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which starred his real-life partner Frances McDormand. But it allowed Ethan to creatively explore some of the corners of his “non-traditional marriage” with Cooke, who identifies as queer. Plus, says Cooke, that title was just “too good to waste.”
The couple had previously attempted to mount Drive-Away in the early-aughts, with Allison Anders set to direct and stars from Holly Hunter to Christina Applegate attached at various points. When they couldn’t secure financing, they put the idea away, revisiting it during the height of Coen’s pandemic doldrums. To avoid the advent of cellphones and social media interfering with the crime caper plot, Coen and Cooke made the film a 1999 period piece, complete with Y2K and 2000 election panic, and forged ahead.
“It was that script that everyone wanted to get their hands on, especially for women that like to do comedy,” says Feldstein, who auditioned to play the long-suffering Sukie over Zoom wearing one of her wife Bonnie’s flannels. “I truly think my eyes got wider with every page turn. It is just so unexpected and wacky and joyful and funny and raunchy and refreshing and I felt all of that.”
In a virtual waiting room of her own, Viswanathan, best known for her roles in Blockers and Miracle Workers, was securing the role of Marian, who spends much of the movie nursing her “big, easily bruised heart.” The only problem? Qualley was vying for the same part. When she failed to get cast, the star of Maid and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, emailed Coen. He was disappointed she hadn’t auditioned to play the wild-at-heart Jamie. “I can audition for Jamie, give me two seconds flat,” she replied. “Then he was like, ‘Well, an artist usually knows best,’” Qualley tells VF. “And I was like, ‘No, I don’t know best, I don’t know anything at all. Give me a shot.’”
Her flexibility paid off. Viswanathan learned of her partner in crime’s identity over Instagram. “I got a notification that Margaret Qualley started following me, followed by a DM that said, ‘Is this real life?’” Months later, they met in New York City, walking and talking from the Theater District to the East Village for their first rehearsal. Says Viswanathan, “It was just very clear that we would become friends, but it all came very easily for us. I love her.”
It’s impossible to write about this film without getting to the dildos. Avoiding spoilers (yes, there are phallus-related twists), the sex toy plays a sizable role in the plot and promotion—a “Clone-A-Willy” kit was even included in a press mailer for the movie. “Every time there was a question about a dildo, everyone would be like, ‘Tricia?’ I was the expert on dildos,” says Cooke. The props department was unfazed. “You think that you’re the first person who brought all these dildos to a project, but the prop master was just like, ‘Yeah, the last three movies I’ve been on, I’ve had to make dildos for,’” says Cooke.
The silicone appendages come into play through the film’s bevy of A-list cameos, which include Matt Damon, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, and Miley Cyrus, who appears in an uncredited role as hippie Tiffany Plaster Caster, an homage to the late visual artist Cynthia Plaster Caster. They initially approached Cyrus because of her advocacy for homeless LGBTQ+ youth through her Happy Hippie Foundation—unaware of her frequent dabbling in the world of dildos.
“We didn’t know that Miley Cyrus performs with large dildos on stage, or that she had a dedicated dildo room in her house,” says Cooke, “so when she came on set, we’re like, ‘Do you know who Cynthia Plaster Caster is?’ And she’s like, ‘I thought that’s why you hired me.’”
Or as Coen puts it, “She said something bizarre like, ‘Didn’t you see my dildo room in Architectural Digest?’ No, Miley, we didn’t see the dildo room.”
Feldstein got acquainted with a dildo room of her own during a scene where her character Sukie sobs while removing the wall dildo in her and Jamie’s home. “Normally when you’re hysterically crying in a drama, there’s sensitive energy around it. This was the exact opposite,” the actor says with a laugh. “There was the Chihuahua [the couple’s shared pet] and the Chihuahua’s trainer, then Ethan and Trish handed me a power drill and I was like, ‘You guys, I am not this type of queer girl, I don’t know how to use this.’”
In crafting their own B movie, Coen and Cooke turned to pulpy female-centered favorites including 1992’s Poison Ivy starring Drew Barrymore, Bad Girls Go to Hell, and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! “John Waters is the genius. He’ll get really nasty; you almost want to cover your eyes, you can’t watch it,” says Coen. “We’re so vanilla compared to that movie—totally square, but that’s what you aspire to—something that’s trashy and nasty and fun.”
Part of retaining that breeziness was doing something basically unheard of anymore—making an 84-minute movie. “I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus,” Cooke begins, “but it’s so exhausting to watch two-and-a-half-hour movies when you’re cutting it in your head, even if that’s not your profession. And why? It seems a little indulgent.”
As for where the dildos reside now, the couple tosses out hypothetical homes—behind glass at Hard Rock Cafe, on display at New York City’s Museum of Sex, before disclosing their true resting place. “I mean, those, we definitely kept,” says Cooke. “Some things you don’t, but the dildos? For sure.”
On some days, says Coen, making Drive-Away with Cooke brought him back to the experience of 1984’s Blood Simple—his first film with Joel. “As much experience as I have, and I’ve been doing this all my life,” he adds, “it was naive in a way.”
The film also felt like a “pure” endeavor for Qualley, fresh off a five-month shoot in Paris for The Substance, an upcoming horror film featuring Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid. In that project, “I was literally supposed to look perfect,” she says. “I had to work out like crazy and put on fake boobs and hair extensions and makeup and blah, blah, blah, just stick my butt out and do the whole thing, right? I went straight from that experience to making this movie—chopped my hair off, put on a pair of jeans, walked around without trying to make my body look good. It was such a breath of fresh air.”
That liberation also extended into the film’s more intimate moments, of which there are many as Marian and Jamie continue their journey. “I’ve never seen a movie do sex like this, you know?” Qualley explains. “I mean, as an actress, it was certainly the most enjoyable sex scenes I’ve ever filmed. Sex scenes usually require me to try to look hot and make something erotic, and this one was just to try to get a laugh. It’s fun to see women being funny in sex rather than hot.”
All of this goodwill made it easy for the duo to hire Qualley to star in Honey Don’t!—the second film in a planned trilogy of unconnected queer B movies. Chris Evans and Aubrey Plaza have also been cast in the production, which starts filming soon. “I’ve made it clear since day one that any time they’ll have me, I’ll be there. I have no life when it comes to them,” says Qualley. “Sometimes deciding whether or not to do a movie can be really hard. Because I also love being home and love my life and love, like, New Jersey, but then you get the Ethan Coen and Tricia Cookes of the world and it all becomes quite simple. Yep, I’ll ship out for this in a heartbeat.”
For Feldstein, Drive-Away afforded her the opportunity to reclaim the “bread and butter” character roles of her early career following juggernaut undertakings like Monica Lewinsky in Impeachment: American Crime Story and Fanny Brice in Broadway’s Funny Girl. “The joy for me in Lady Bird was getting to support Saoirse [Ronan]’s performance,” she says. “It was so unexpected for me in my career to have moments where I got to be at the center. So it was such a gift for me to help the dolls on their ride—or in my case, kind of deter the dolls on the ride. A really juicy supporting role feels like a homecoming.”
Then again, it’s also completely new territory. “It was the first time I ever got to play a queer character,” says Feldstein, who tells me she came into her own queerness in her mid-20s. “It was nice for me to get to say ex-girlfriend [onscreen], because that’s just not something that I’ve ever gotten to do before.”
She’d like to be here again—and in films like But I’m a Cheerleader or her own Booksmart, which embrace the joy that queer women experience. “I would never want to discount all those films that portrayed the more difficult, delicate side to being queer, because those are all so important. The problem is not that those stories are being made, it’s that those are often the only stories being made,” Feldstein explains. “So the queer experience becomes reduced to just the painful, devastating, or secretive sides of it. My favorite films are sweet, funny, raunchy—they’re just often led by straight men. It’s just so nice to add to the list so it doesn’t feel like we’re selecting from 10 movies.”
This idea was also top of mind for Cooke. “In an ideal world, it reaches people in areas where they don’t get to see a lot of queer cinema,” she says. “It was very important for us, especially for me, to say, ‘Here are however many queer characters, and the movie’s not about them being lesbians. Fourteen-year-olds or people who are just coming out would see it, and think, ‘It’s fun to be a lesbian.’”
But before that can be spun into something loftier than it is, Cooke maintains: “We want it to be a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
Adds Coen wryly, “The message is: ‘Fun is good.’ A very brave statement.”
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