Did you two meet through Blame?
Quinn Shephard: We did.
Nadia Alexander: Yeah. We met at my callback because Quinn reached out to me on Facebook and was like, “Hi, would you like to audition for my movie?” And I was like, “Yeah, why not? This girl seems cool.” And then I sent her a tape…
Quinn, was that audition already a form of flirtation?
QS: Honestly, when I met Nadia, I’d never dated a woman before. And when I met Nadia, I immediately felt just very enamored by her talent and her personality. I was like, “This girl is so funny and so good. Every situation she’s in, she’s just her.” It’s very rare that you meet somebody who is just so themselves. We were just like best friends. We weren’t necessarily clear that it was a flirtation. During the shoot and stuff, we were just friends.
NA: And we got very close fast—
QS: Really good friends.
NA: And all of my best friends are guys. I often struggled to be friends with girls. I don’t know if that’s a queer thing because it’s always like, “Oh, what is this?” But I was like, “Wow, I cannot believe I’ve made a best girlfriend so fast.” Literally two days in, I was like, she’s my wife.
QS: Yeah, she was literally in my phone as “wifey” by day three.
Well, that’s prescient! So you officially got together after the movie wrapped, but tell me how the proposal went down on Not Okay. This doesn’t feel like an especially romantic film to me but I know relationships have their own logic.
QS: The setting was romantic. Even if the film is not decidedly not.
NA: I knew years ago that I wanted to marry this person. I was like, “I’m done. This is it. We’re good.” And I always had this idea that because we had met on a film set, I would love to propose to her on a film set. Ideally her next film. And so when Not Okay got greenlit, I was like, “All right, I’m going to do it.” And I started telling people slowly on set, like, “Keep it secret but I’m going to do this at the end of wrap.”
