Joel Kim Booster's entire life has led to 'Fire Island' — even if his parents won't watch it (2024)

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Joel Kim Booster is in Twitter rehab. Describing himself as "terminally online," the 34-year-old comedian says the only way to cure his social media dependency is to kick him off the platform permanently — preferably, he says, before Elon Musk takes over. "I need to go out the way Patti Harrison went out: imitating Nabisco on Twitter," he jokes. "That's the way to do it."

The platform has been affecting his happiness as of late. By all accounts, Booster should be enjoying his victory lap that is the promotional tour of his new rom-com, the Pride and Prejudice-inspired Fire Island. The well-reviewed movie is not only the biggest project he has ever written and headlined, but is the first film backed by a major Hollywood studio (Walt Disney's Searchlight Pictures) to feature an entirely LGBTQ lead cast: Bowen Yang, Margaret Cho, Conrad Ricamora, James Scully, and Matt Rogers also star.

Fire Island, premiering on Hulu today, kicks off a slate of Booster-centric projects, including a Netflix stand-up-comedy special on June 21 and the debut of Loot, an Apple workplace sitcom with Maya Rudolph playing a publicly spiraling billionaire, on June 24. One critic glowingly described Fire Island, about a group of friends enjoying their last summer together at the New York hotspot, as doing for Pride and Prejudice what Clueless did for Emma.

Booster lost it. "It's one of those screaming, crying, throwing-up reactions," he tells EW. "I said from the start, if people bring this movie up in the same breath as Clueless — which I think is as close to a perfect movie as you can possibly get — I would be happy."

Still, Booster can't help but fixate on negative feedback, mainly via Twitter. He feels there is legitimate frustration from members of the LGBTQ community who claim his movie doesn't represent all corners of gay life. The typically vibrant and snappy Booster, now sporting freshly-dyed blonde hair since the last time we spoke on the Fire Island set in September 2021, seems more vulnerable. "There can be a hundred people in a room and just one of them could hate your movie, and that's the one that I will focus on," he says. "That is something that I'm working on." Hence the Twitter rehab. He still finds himself scrolling through the feeds, but his boyfriend is the gatekeeper of his access.

Andrew Ahn (Spa Night, Driveways), Booster's director on Fire Island, tried to reel in his star's anxieties while shooting the movie on location at the Long Island beach getaway. His advice: We cannot write this movie for Twitter. Booster is still trying to internalize this months later. He didn't set out to please the entire LGBTQ community — "I set out to tell a story that was deeply personal for me and my friendship with Bowen Yang."

Joel and Bowen's (not so) meet-cute

Booster stars in Fire Island as Noah, a gender-bent gay version of Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Every summer, Noah and his closest friends pal around together at their favorite queer hotspots, but this year is different. Erin (Cho), an older lesbian and surrogate mother to the group, reveals she can't afford to keep their vacation house. So, the pressure is on to make this last trip memorable. That means finding a hookup for Noah's mopey best friend Howie (Yang), and all signs are pointing to a cute doctor named Charlie (Scully). But Charlie's friends — including the Mr. Darcy-esque Will (Ricamora), with whom Noah is equal parts infuriated and intrigued — aren't especially welcoming.

Booster has been conflating Austen's work with gay culture since his first trip to Fire Island with Yang in 2016, when he read Pride and Prejudice on the ferry ride from Sayville, New York. They had met three years prior in New York City. It's one of those apocryphal stories they've both told so many times that neither know which details might've been fudged over the years. But the general premise remains the same: Booster and Yang both use the phrase "well-meaning" when describing the straight white comedian who connected them on Facebook. "He was like, 'You two are both gay and Asian. You guys should be friends,'" says Yang, 31. "It was like someone banging two Ken dolls together and going, 'You guys should get married.' It felt so forced that we ignored each other for the better part of a year."

"I think there was a part of us where we were like, 'We don't want to like each other because this person thinks that we should, just because we're gay and Asian,'" Booster remembers. "It turns out that we also have a lot of other things in common. I didn't know a lot of other gay Asian men who were trying to do comedy at the time. It was an immediate life-raft moment."

He and Yang were in different places in their lives than they are now. For one thing, money was an issue. At the time, Booster and Yang, the latter now a pivotal Saturday Night Live cast member, were up-and-comers; they had to share a bedroom with three other people. "It was a real struggle to scrounge up the money to be able to afford to go those first years," Booster recalls.

They also felt Fire Island had a reputation as a destination for a specific kind of gay guy: hot white jocks with abs and speedos. "Neither of us really met the criteria," the South Korea-born Booster says. Yang, the son of Chinese immigrants, agrees. "I remember thinking it's gonna be very alienating, there's gonna be so many things that will put me off," he says. "I don't know why I went in with that baggage."

That anxiety is at the core of Booster's movie, as is what they discovered during their trips: a welcome reprieve from straight people. "I didn't realize how much weight I was carrying around existing in largely heterosexual spaces, especially as a standup comic," Booster explains. "All of my coworkers were straight, and to go out there with other mostly gay comedians and have this freedom was really life-changing for me."

Yang remembers a particular moment when he felt that weight lift. It was at an underwear party at the island's Ice Palace resort — one of many real-life experiences Booster channeled into his script for Fire Island. "We all got into our jockstraps — I went in feeling so insecure, but then I immediately looked around and even the people with the chiseled abs were a little uncomfortable," Yang recalls. "There's something equalizing about this. Despite the fact that people are looking around, evaluating each other on a physical level, there is something kind of liberating to think about how everyone's feeling a little squirmy." For Booster, these kind of visits to queer enclaves have become vital: "You need those moments of relief. You need those moments where you can feel completely free."

Booster always intended to make Fire Island with Yang; on their original excursion, he joked about one day making a gay Pride and Prejudice. That dream became a reality in 2019 when he sold it as a series called The Trip to Quibi, the now-defunct mobile streaming platform that shut down almost as soon as it launched. "There was this purgatory phase where I was like, 'I hope I get to do this. This would be so special,'" Yang says of the period where Booster tried to keep the concept alive until he found a new home at Searchlight Pictures in June 2021. "I had some friends ask about it, too. We're all laughing on Twitter about how Quibi went down, which is sad, but I think people were wondering what would happen to [The Trip]. For a while, I didn't really know what to tell them. Luckily, Searchlight came in and saved us."

Building his chosen family

Booster grew up in an adoptive family in Plainfield, Ill., where he worshiped at the altar of Nora Ephron, notably the trifecta of Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally…, and You've Got Mail, which he would watch with his mother and sister. He had two other all-time favorites: My Best Friend's Wedding and Clueless. (Booster samples the latter's dialogue in Fire Island when Howie utters, "Way harsh, Tai.")

He theorizes these cinematic happy endings royally screwed him, relationship-wise, in the long run. "That's probably why I was single for so long — I was looking for something like that," Booster says. He already craved attention as a child, so he went out for as many community and high-school theater productions that he could manage. He later pursued acting more seriously at Millikin University, but his first year of summer stock, which included a rendition of Thoroughly Modern Millie, made him rethink his career path.

"Thoroughly Modern Millie did not bring me joy," Booster says. "It was one of those stereotypical Asian roles. I didn't speak a word of English in the play. So that was really tough. I was like, if this is all there is, then [acting is] not it for me." Booster would switch his major to writing, which he feels primed him well for when he moved to Chicago after graduation. A friend, comedian Beth Stelling, suggested that he combine performing and writing into stand-up comedy.

Booster believes that any comic belonging to a minority group needs to foster a special kind of delusion — one that, in an industry dominated by straight white guys, hardens resolve: "I'm going to carve out this space for myself," is how he puts it. "What I have to say is important and people will listen to me." Cho is someone he credits heavily as an inspiration. Her 1994 sitcom All-American Girl fundamentally altered what he dreamed for himself in high school. "As a little kid, you want to be an actor, but if you don't see it, you don't think it's possible," Booster says. "Even though her life was not my life, her family was not my family — I had a very different upbringing — just seeing that [show] made it feel possible for me."

The fact that Cho now plays his character's mother figure in Fire Island is something Booster may never get over. Booster knows his own intensely religious parents will never watch the film, even though it's now out in the world. "I think the orgy [scene] might truly send them over the edge," he jokes. His mother and father, who adopted him as an infant, learned that their son was gay after reading his journal in high school. The tension between them became so palpable that he moved out his senior year and crashed on friends' couches.

These days, he's on much better terms with the parentals, but Booster accepts they can only be there for him to a point. He describes his mom as "uncurious" about what his work actually entails. "I don't need her to see [my work] by any means," he says. "I have a wonderful network of chosen family that I've assembled around me to fill the gaps where my mom can't be as supportive as I would like. Honestly, I've moved beyond that."

He's excited about what it means for gay kids growing up in Plainfield, like he did, to have access to a film like Fire Island. "If you don't have your own gay chosen family in your life, I hope that this movie will inspire you to seek people out," he says, "even just for a little bit, [to] give you that sense of community that I feel all the time when I'm surrounded by my gay friends."

Even if they keep you off Twitter.

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• Fire Island review: Pride and Prejudice goes to the Pines in a lively gay update
• Polaroids from the set of gay rom-com Fire Island are a connection to the beach getaway's past