The Threesome (2025) is a film that enjoyed major distribution and release. The romantic-comedy-drama has a running time of just under two hours, and stars Jonah Hauer-King, Ruby Cruz, Jaboukie Young-White, and Zoey Deutch (who also executive produced the flick.) In Little Rock, Arkansas, things get complicated when recording engineer Connor (Hauer-King), waitress Olivia (Deutch), and grad student Jenny (Cruz) have a menage-a-trois, and both women end up pregnant.
The bi characters are Olivia (Deutch) and Jenny (Cruz). Olivia has more of a cool-girl aesthetic of hip street clothes, with bangs and long brown hair. Jenny, on the other hand, wears more conservative clothing and layers of it, and wears her hair in a neat shoulder-length bob. As the film progresses, both of their maternity wear gets closer to a shared style of overalls and comfortable clothing.
The Threesome does not happen without Jenny and Olivia being attracted to each other. Olivia comes up with the idea and initiates the encounter, which despite the fact that Connor is there, it’s not done or performed for the male gaze.
Both characters’ approach to their queerness is a bit more casual than typical fare, but is still an important part of their identities as well as the plot. Neither of them use the term “bi” to describe themselves, or make mention of previous attractions to other women or same-sex partners. However, they are both well-developed lead characters, who each have hopes, fears, dreams, and flaws.
Olivia is smart, cool, funny, and clever, but also impulsive and falls more into the “messy bi” category. On the other hand, Jenny is more mild without being meek, smart, funny, caring, and trying to make the best of a difficult situation. There is also the interesting component of her coming from a background of faith, which makes it tough for her to navigate telling her parents how the soon-to-be bundle of joy came about. Her hesitancy to tell them can be read as a flaw or lack of courage, but is certainly an understandable one. During a moment of confrontation with Olivia, she also underlines how hurt she felt at Olivia’s departure, saying she thought she really liked her, and had hoped that the two of them could help each other out in such a tight spot in their respective lives.
For Cruz, identifying and playing Jenny’s understated arc as a queer woman was an important part of the project for her, and why playing queer people is important to her. In an interview for People (as quoted on AOL), she noted: “‘It was fascinating finding that underlying narrative for Jenny in this movie because it isn’t something that’s focused on,’ Cruz tells PEOPLE … it is something that she’s going through where she’s had her first experience with another girl, and then it’s kind of that awakening is swept under the rug by all of this other life stuff that’s happening and she doesn’t have really time to process it.”“So I think that comes after the span of the movie is when she might start exploring that more. It’s super important for me — I’m so proud, I’m happy to be fortunate enough to play so many gay characters. It was really fascinating for Jenny specifically because she was someone who was so different from me and we don’t really explore that side of her.” It was kind of fun for me as an actor to just do that on my own time,” she adds.”
Cruz is no stranger to playing queer icons, as she originated the first lesbian princess in the Disney+ TV series Willow, as well as other roles like on The Sex Lives of College Girls.
Cruz herself identifies as pansexual.
The Threesome has been certified fresh at 77% overall positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Threesome offers a not-unrealistic look at different iterations of queerness that often are not seen on screen, and usually not at the same time — Olivia, self-assured but messy, and Jenny, faithful and more gentle whose exploration time gets cut short — or, at least, put on hold — by the consequences of the encounter. It’s rare to have two major bi characters in a modern film — even rarer to have two as different realizations, yet still go on a full journey of growth and inner lives, as Jenny and Olivia. And all of this done without taking a cheap way out of making said threesome something purely for the men to enjoy watching. As such, it deserved a spot of recognition in bi representation in modern film. Check out our three out four unicorns review of this movie here!