Anyone but You’s real draw is the supporting cast

polygon.com:

After slipping into theaters just before Christmas of 2023, the romantic comedyAnyone but You became a sleeper hit, lingering in theaters and racking up hundreds of millions at the box office, thanks to its sexy stars and flirty banter. Now that it’s on Netflix, it’s likely to find a whole new audience and start a whole new round of conversation about what makes rom-coms exciting these days. But the steamy scenes and its stars’ off-screen chemistry isn’t what really makes the movie enjoyable — the real draw is the stellar supporting cast.

Directed by Will Gluck (Easy A, Friends with Benefits), Anyone but You is a (very) loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The movie centers around law student Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and finance bro Ben (Glen Powell), two stubborn people who had one very good date that blew apart, thanks to miscommunication. Now they hate each other! But they’re pulled back into the same web when Bea’s sister, Halle (Hadley Robinson), starts dating Ben’s childhood friend Claudia (Alexandra Shipp).

When Halle and Claudia get engaged and decide to have a destination wedding in Australia, Ben and Bea nearly ruin the opening wedding festivities with their bad attitudes. But when both their exes show up, they decide to pretend to be in a relationship so Ben can make his sexy Australian ex, Margaret (Charlee Fraser), jealous, and Bea can show her parents that she’s doing just fine without her childhood sweetheart, Jonathan (Darren Barnet). True to the rom-com formula, that fake relationship ends up digging up some real feelings.

But even though Ben and Bea are super hot and their whole fake-relationship situation is compelling, the best shenanigans come from the supporting cast.

Claudia, Halle, and Claudia’s brother, Pete (GaTa), are actually scheming to trick Ben and Bea into liking each other — which is about as far as the Much Ado adaptation goes. Claudia and Pete’s stepfather, Roger (Bryan Brown), is absolutely gung-ho for the idea