15 minutes with Hayley Kiyoko

Just over a decade ago, Hayley Kiyoko, then 24, released ‘Girls Like Girls’, a song and music video about queer teen love that helped a whole wave of millennials and Gen Z explore and understand their sexuality, young love and belonging. In the 11 years since then, the anthemic pop song has racked up over 165 million views on YouTube. In 2023, Kiyoko published the novel, Girls Like Girls, developing the viral video into a bestselling book that captured the hearts of a new audience. And now, the actor-turned-singer-turned writer-turned-director has just released Girls Like Girls, the movie.

Starring Maya Da Costa (Coley), Myra Molloy (Sonya), Zach Braff (Curtis) and Levon Hawke (Trent), the new film is an evocative coming-of-age romance set over the course of one sun-soaked summer in Oregon in 2006, where new-girl Coley falls in love for the first time while coming to terms with her own sense of self.

As the film hits screens in the UK, following rave reviews in the US, Hayley Kiyoko (fondly known as “Lesbian Jesus” to her fans), sat down with Alice Casely-Hayford to discuss representation, worth and Girls Like Girls in its three iterations.

Alice Casely-Hayford: Congratulations on Girls Like Girls. It's so beautiful. I was a noughties teenager, so it really was nostalgic for me. The film has been ten years in the making. How does it feel to have it out in the world, something that's so precious and has been a decade's work?

Hayley Kiyoko: It's a very vulnerable feeling. It feels like it's been such an intense experience just because of the length of the journey, really. The story was inspired by a little bit of this trauma that I went through and this girl that I had fallen for in my youth and to believe in the story so long, I've had to hold it so tight and so close.

This back half of the journey has been letting it go and passing it on. When I cast Maya Da Costa and Myra Molloy, I told them, this story is not mine. This is your story now. It's up to you to portray the characters how you want to and to share that experience with others and hopefully make other people feel seen and represented for the first time. It's been a very beautiful and immense and intense experience, but it feels wonderful that I made it and that it exists. There were so many times that I never thought it would actually happen.

ACH: I know representation, visibility and being able to feel seen are so important to you. I went down a rabbit hole looking at the whole journey of Girls Like Girls. I was looking back at all of the comments on the original video from 2015, and there was a top comment from about seven months ago and someone had written: “I wrote a comment here when I was 15 years old and struggling to come to terms with my queerness and the loss of my first love. Just saw the trailer for the movie and came back to update that I'm married now to the most beautiful woman in the world. To all the gays who are struggling right now, stay strong, your love is enough.”

It is so uplifting to see how much your art moves and helps people like that. Is it your main main mission to help people through your storytelling across different platforms?

HK: Yeah, I think a lot of us are driven by what we wish we had growing up or what we're still searching for or seeking. I always wanted to feel seen. I always wanted to have somebody who validated my experiences in a very one-to-one way. And so I think that's always motivated me as an artist, whether that was through music, writing, and now directing.

Every moment that got really dark when I felt like I had lost hope of getting this film made, I thought of people like that, of people who truly need that kind of representation to believe that they matter. Those comments mean everything. It brings a tear to my eye and it's just like oh, it was worth the effort.

ACH: You've said you've stepped into new creative fields out of necessity because the door's slammed closed in your face. Having been a singer and a writer, is being a director where you want to stay?

HK: Yes! It's so crazy because I feel like I just climbed this immense mountain and then you get to the top and there are just so many more mountains to climb. I'm just beginning because I've had to overachieve to even play in the game. You know, like under 5% of films are directed by women, women of colour. This whole journey has just been being able to get the opportunity to be able to tell more stories. That's been hard.

ACH: You must be exhausted from the climb but what's next?

HK: I would love to adapt my second book, Where There's Room For Us about my meet cute with my fiancé and make that into a film or TV show. I would love for it to not take ten years. I'd love to immediately start and be able to financially sustain myself as a filmmaker and as a creative.

I think a lot of our journey is how do you do what you love and be able to sustain that. A lot of my career has been pivots and weaving and going through the back door to try to get to this point.

ACH: Well, speaking of how multi-faceted your career has been, Taylor Jenkins Reed described you as the most creatively ambitious and confident woman she's ever met. Do you think you're that creatively ambitious and confident? How would you describe your own self-worth?

HK: I think I present quite confident. When it comes to my art and expressing myself, I'm extremely confident and ambitious and motivated. And in my personal life, I am socially a little awkward and insecure.

I think navigating love and romance was always challenging for me, feeling worthy to be loved back.

ACH: How much do external factors influence your self-worth, in terms of reviews and audiences online?

HK: I'm a human being, so it affects me. I'm so grateful that [Girls Like Girls] has been well received because this film is literally my soul, my blood, sweat and tears. I do take that personally because I've given it everything that I have and I've sacrificed and worked so hard to be able to have this moment become realised.

My whole life has been affected by not feeling like I fit in a box, not feeling like I belong, like everything in my life has actually been dictated by external judgments and feelings. I have been motivated by a lot of these external pressures and stigmas that I've had to try to break.

ACH: Well, this film has already resonated with so many and will continue to help people feel more validated and worthy. Do you hope that things are a bit easier for queer teens today? Or do you feel that the challenges are fundamentally still the same that you experienced?

HK: I think both. We've made a lot of strides forward. And yet there's still so much uncertainty, lack of equality and safety for our entire community. And so when I look at film, I don't know how much we've really grown as far as representation and a young queer person being able to see their experience validated one-to-one.

I'm trying to fix that. And I think in music, where I started, it has grown. But again, when I started, there wasn't a lot of queer representation in the mainstream media.

And so that's why I did that. Now that's kind of taken a life out of its own. There's a lot more representation in that space. So now I'm in the film space trying to basically do the same thing.

Things are changing. It's slow. You have one here and one here and one here. And it's like, hopefully we'll have many, many, many more. I just hope I can just continue to make more films.

Girls Like Girls is out in cinemas now.