"Chemistry is a really real thing -- and sometimes it exists, sometimes it doesn't. Corey and I always had it," says Carson.
Sofia Carson and Corey Mylchreest are no strangers to telling sweeping love stories for Netflix. While he rose to fame a couple years ago for playing the affable yet afflicted King George in the Bridgerton prequel Queen Charlotte, she has parlayed her early success as a Disney teen star into headlining and producing a string of popular streaming films (Purple Hearts, Carry-On, My Life List).
So it seems particularly fitting that Carson and Mylchreest would team up for My Oxford Year, which premiered last Friday on the streamer. Adapted from Julia Whelan's novel of the same name and directed by Iain Morris, the weepy rom-com stars Carson as Anna de la Vega, an ambitious American woman who, before beginning a job as a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs, decides to fulfill a childhood dream of studying English literature for a year at Oxford University.
On her first day of classes, Anna discovers that the poetry professor that she most wanted to learn from has just gotten a promotion. While the professor will do the marking, her charming British graduate student, Jamie Davenport (Mylchreest), will step in as her teaching replacement for the term. Despite getting off on the wrong foot, Anna and Jamie's immediate attraction transforms into a casual romance -- one that threatens to upend the carefully laid-out plans she had made for her own future.
"Anna steps foot into Oxford with such clarity as to what the rest of the year is going to be. She's going to take in as much literature and poetry and wisdom as possible, and isn't interested in distractions," Carson tells Harper's Bazaar. "Of course, we come to know Jamie's very profound reason for pushing people away. But I think they're both very attracted to each other's intellect and brains and wisdom, and mutual love of poetry and literature. They spoke a language that not everyone could speak, and that was really exciting and thrilling for them. They met their match, in a way, in each other."
"They see things in each other that they desire for themselves," agrees Mylchreest. "I think there's quite a lot of synergy between the two of them in that Jamie carries a lot of suppression of his desires being a suppressed British man, and Anna is very much outward. I think that it's a good balance. She forces him in many ways to do things, to confront things, to talk about things in a way that he wouldn't get to that place on his own."
The "timeless" quality of Anna and Jamie's bittersweet love story was particularly appealing to Carson, who first took a meeting with Temple Hill -- the production company behind YA classics such as Twilight, The Fault in Our Stars and Love, Simon -- months after the unexpected success of Purple Hearts cemented her status as one of Netflix's most bankable romantic leads. After signing on to lead and executive produce My Oxford Year, she became heavily involved in each step of the production, from the earliest drafts of the script through to the final editing process.
One of Carson's biggest notes as a producer was tailoring the role to fit her own cultural identity as a daughter of immigrant parents from Latin America. "When I was first auditioning and going in for roles, it was really disheartening but unfortunately not surprising that most roles for young Hispanic women were so profoundly stereotypical and so profoundly degrading," she recalls. "So it became my duty in every role that I've played that Hispanic women are properly represented onscreen for all that they can be and not just one thing."
In the first script that she read, Anna's mother was a cleaning lady. "As much as I have such honor and such respect for anyone that does that job, I think it's a shame that Hispanics are represented only as that," says Carson. "I wanted it to be clear that her father was a teacher, and her mother was actually a doctor in Argentina. However, she's a nurse in the States because her degree doesn't carry over. I think these are stories of Hispanics that are far too often not represented onscreen, so it was really important to me to have [her family] represented in that way, especially in the political landscape that we are in today."
From the outset, Carson, who had watched Queen Charlotte, always knew she wanted Mylchreest to play the Jamie to her Anna. "Chemistry is a really real thing -- and sometimes it exists, sometimes it doesn't. Corey and I always had it, so it was really easy to melt into this love story together," says Carson, who, despite testing with a number of other male actors for the role, actively campaigned for Mylchreest behind the scenes. "We also have that funny kind of witty back-and-forth that Anna and Jamie have as Sofia and Corey. I give him a hard time all the time. So that witty, fun, cat-and-mouse dynamic was very alive and came very easily to us."
Even in conversation with a perfect stranger, Carson and Mylchreest show signs of the same kind of witty banter. When asked the age-old question of which of their characters fell first and who fell harder, the co-stars have wildly different answers.
"I think Anna probably falls first. Jamie's got a lot more reason to withhold his heart. But try as he might, she knocks the door down," he says.
"I think he fell first, but he didn't express it nor did he know how to express it," she counters.
"When that happens, I don't know who falls harder, but he definitely falls very, very hard," he adds. "His reason for not wanting to be with her is because he loves her. It's because he cares about her."
"I think they both fell equally as hard," she says.
Literature forms the foundation of Anna and Jamie's whirlwind romance. They spend countless hours talking about it, musing about it, analyzing it. Their first hook-up is initiated after he takes her to visit the Bodleian Library for the first time. For the actors, the poetry their characters studied was as deeply revealing as anything they could have said in the script.
"In building Anna, I kept going to two authors and two quotes that felt like the tentpoles of who she is. One of them was Thoreau: 'To live deliberately.' The second one was Emily Dickinson's 'Forever is composed of nows,'" Carson explains. "However, Anna's understanding of these quotes differs exponentially from Jamie's. When Anna understood 'to live deliberately,' she understood it as planning every single moment of her life so that she can live it deliberately. 'Forever is composed of nows' meant that she had to live every single moment to the fullest by planning every single second of her life rather than living, experiencing and living in the messiness of life. Her understanding of how life should be lived is completely transformed."
Jamie, by contrast, grew up in an old English, aristocratic family where he was taught to resolve matters with the head, not the heart. "Jamie, more subconsciously than consciously, desperately clings to that literature, to that poetry, and uses it as a way in which he can experience the world, but also express his experience of the world," Mylchreest remarks. "If he quotes something, then he excuses his own cringiness. He doesn't have to sacrifice his cynicism if he uses someone else's words. He is a very cynical person, but there's a dichotomy in him because he is incredibly emotional and deep-feeling."
Of course, book readers and viewers alike now know that Jamie's fate is deeply tragic: Anna learns that Jamie is dying of the same unnamed terminal cancer that killed his brother years earlier. But rather than continuing with experimental treatments, Jamie would like to spend his final days doing what he loves most at Oxford.
"When you're in a situation like that, you are stripped of a large amount of your agency as a human being because your life is, without your consent, taken away from you," Mylchreest says. One of the only things that is left in your control is not what happens to you but "your effect on those around you -- how much you lean on them, how much you shield from them, how much you try to protect them."
"One of the key things for me was making it clear how deeply Jamie considers those things and makes the decision -- although it will be more painful, more lonely and more sad for him -- to shield a lot of people from that. He doesn't want to leave behind trauma for other people," he explains. "How much of that is selfish and how much of it is selfless? How much of it is him just trying to escape the reality of it and just not look at the elephant in the room?"
As much as Jamie wanted to live his life without the dark cloud of his illness hanging over him, that reality "was always weighing on Anna's shoulders," Carson says. But in the end, "she stands by his decision to stop treatment, and we never see a conversation where Anna asks him otherwise, which is a really difficult and beautiful position to take as a partner, which I think is such a testament to how much Anna knew and understood Jamie and how much she loved him."
Finding that balance between levity and tragedy was a "tricky balance" to strike. "I remember filming the scenes at the ball, and I was struggling because I was like, 'I don't know how you can just be here and dancing and talking about anything silly when this is weighing on you,'" Carson adds. "And then there's a reminder that sometimes the beauty of life is finding light and laughter within the darkness. I think that's also one of the beautiful parts of our film -- it's a tragedy that is almost somehow always grounded in laughter that brings joy."
The heartbreaking end of the film is a major departure from Whelan's novel. Whereas the book ends with Jamie getting a temporary reprieve after surviving a bout of pneumonia and undergoing a successful clinical trial that allows him to make good on his promise of traveling around Europe with Anna (who is named Ella in the book), the film ends with Anna envisioning their adventures together in Europe -- only to reveal that she ended up going on those trips alone.
"In that final scene, it was clear that the love changed Anna in a way that made her realize that life is too short to not do and be everything that you have ever dreamt," says Carson, who reveals that there were conversations leading up to the end of production about whether Jamie should live. This ending was, ultimately, intended to honor both characters, with Anna choosing to stay in Oxford indefinitely to teach the same class that Jamie had once taught.
"When we meet Anna, it's so clear that her love is literature. Her hero was Professor Diane, the professor that was meant to be her teacher when she first arrived at Oxford," Carson continues. "So it was beautiful to see her step into her power in that way, and also making an ode to Jamie and the love that they shared [by offering her class the same cake he had offered her class]. Most of all, we wanted it to end in hope because as much as it is a tragedy, to see life after loss and for it to be a hopeful picture was really important to us."
Having now starred in two beautiful but tragic love stories, Mylchreest admits he is wary of being pigeonholed as a romantic lead. "I think it's important to show different colors and different things that you can do, to show the industry that that's not all you've got to offer," he says. But he stresses that he is "grateful" for playing characters who are wrestling with more existential questions. "George and Jamie exist within what are effectively, on the surface, lighthearted, romance, sometimes funny stories. And yet within them are these two really complex, conflicting, full-rounded people that are really difficult to play. It was an absolute joy, pleasure, privilege -- all of the rest of it -- but [they were] very difficult to pin down and to deeply understand."
As for the future of Queen Charlotte, Mylchreest agrees that the story is "definitely not closed" and, should creator Shonda Rhimes chooses to do so, could be revisited at some point down the road: "It'd be lovely to go back, but unless you know more than I do, then I know as much as you do, and we'll leave it to the hands of Shondaland."
Carson, on the other hand, appears content with embracing her status as Netflix's reigning rom-com queen for the foreseeable future, even if she points out that not all of the films she has made for the streamer fall easily into that genre.
"I think love is such a part of the human experience, and we as consumers love a love story, especially when it's well-made, and this one in particular just felt like a classic. It felt like a timeless love story, and I was so happy to be able to bring that to life for this generation," she says. "But I'm so happy that all the films that I've released have resonated in the way that they have, and it's a privilege and responsibility that I don't take lightly."