The Summer I Turned Pretty Gets Wild in Season 3: “Shit Will Hit the Fan”

Spoilers ahead for The Summer I Turned Pretty season three.

New York City’s Bryant Park is never a quiet place. But anyone walking by on July 16 probably heard even more noise than usual, thanks to hundreds of devoted fans who flocked to the lawn for a screening of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s third and final season. The two-episode premiere elicited shrieks and cheers, groans and gasps—a rapture familiar to Jenny Han, author of the best-selling YA trilogy on which the series is based. Twenty-five years ago, Han herself was hooked on the soapy love triangle at the center of another coming-of-age drama, Felicity. In one memorable episode, Scott Speedman’s Ben stands up Keri Russell’s Felicity when they’re supposed to meet in Bryant Park. The moment imprinted on Han; it’s partly why she wanted to hold her show’s premiere there.

Han has grown accustomed to the fervor her series induces, especially when it’s airing new episodes. “Well, I went to the dentist and everyone was very excited,” she says with a laugh. “They’re like, ‘How does it end?!’ A lot of buzz at the dentist’s office.”

The Prime Video hit resumes after a four-year time jump to find Belly Conklin (played by Lola Tung) in her junior year attending the fictional Finch College with her boyfriend, Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno). Jeremiah’s older brother and Belly’s ex, Conrad (Christopher Briney), is studying to be a doctor at Stanford University.

Sean Kaufman, Gavin Casalegno, Jenny Han, Lola Tung, Christopher Briney, and Rain Spencer attend The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 launch event.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

The question of who Belly should end up with stokes opinions so fierce that the official Summer I Turned Pretty social media account issued an anti-bullying statement prior to the premiere of season three. “Cousins is our safe place,” the post reads, referring to the fictional shore town at the center of the show. “Everything good, everything magical. Let’s keep the conversation kind this summer.”

Briney has gotten used to the impassioned fan response. “We just try to live our lives as if nothing’s different,” he says. “I’m happy people are watching, but I’ve also gotta do my own thing—get back into the grind, find [another] job, you know.” The same can be said of Conrad, who has to miss his late mother Susannah’s (Rachel Blanchard) memorial in order to take a job at a Stanford clinic. Briney says that the emotional ramifications of his decision will be “quite severe.”

But Han has high hopes for a more grown-up version of Conrad, who has also been going to therapy since the events of the show’s second season. “I was excited for him to go to the West Coast and in some ways start fresh. It’s a lot harder to try out new things when you’re around the same people,” she says. “In a new place, there’s no preconceived notions or expectations on who you are and how you would behave in a situation. So being away from everyone, he’s been able to really explore who he could be…. He’s doing things that he used to love and then cut himself off from because he was in a not great place before. In the interim, I think he’s done a lot of healing.”

Jeremiah could stand to follow his brother’s example. He cheated on Belly during a spring break getaway to Cabo, following a pre-trip fight. Jeremiah believed they were broken up; Belly did not. “It’s pretty absurd that an argument that was so short and quick would cause Jeremiah to think that they were broken up,” says Tung, who plays Belly. “I appreciate how passionate everyone is about picking their sides.” For the record: She doesn’t think they were actually on a break.

Casalegno, who plays Jeremiah, is naturally more understanding. “I can see why both characters feel the way they do, and they are both very valid,” the actor, who is working internationally at the moment, tells Vanity Fair via email. “There are deeper things in both of their thought processes that have led them to this point in their relationship. What he did was wrong, yes, but it’s not always black and white.”

The ordeal has inspired intense online debate akin to Ross and Rachel’s break-related fiasco on Friends. “I think that Jeremiah genuinely thought that they were broken up. I don’t think Belly felt the same way…. It feels like a huge betrayal,” says Han. At the same time, “it wouldn’t feel great for anybody—even if both parties thought they were broken up—to open up Instagram and see your ex-partner with someone else so soon.” Does Han think that the Belly-Jeremiah break discourse will endure as long as Ross and Rachel’s has? “I mean, it would be an honor,” she says. “The fact that it’s even a debate just shows that it’s not really cut-and-dry.”

Briney also sees the whole thing as “a gray area…but would I say they were on a break? Probably not.” Then again, Belly is keeping a secret of her own: She hasn’t told Jeremiah about an emotionally impactful few days she spent with Conrad over winter break. “I don’t support either decision,” says Briney, “but sleeping with someone on your spring break and then getting back together with your girlfriend is a little sleazier.”

By Lenne Chai/Amazon MGM Studios.

Conrad may be favored among fans at the moment, but Briney takes all reactions to the show in stride. “If people are liking or not liking your character, you’ve done your job right,” he says. “So if people are hating on Jeremiah, I hope Gavin’s proud of his work.”

Belly is one of many characters on The Summer I Turned Pretty living a romantic melodrama. Her brother Steven (Sean Kaufman) and her best friend Taylor (Rain Spencer) are arguing over how to define their relationship when he gets into a car accident, landing him in the hospital with a traumatic brain injury. Shortly after Steven’s condition stabilizes and he awakes from a medically induced coma, The Summer I Turned Pretty drops another bombshell: Jeremiah begs for Belly’s forgiveness, then asks her to marry him.

Belly wasn’t the only one caught off guard by that twist. “I was reading the third book for the first time like, ‘What?! We’re going into a marriage arc now? Aren’t these characters like 22?’” Briney recalls, teasing that “there will be some shock ahead” for Conrad as well.

When asked who will have the worst reaction to Belly and Jeremiah’s engagement, Tung tilts her head to the side, giving me an amused look: “Who do you think?”

Even though Belly has accepted Jeremiah’s proposal, he’ll need to do a lot of work to fully regain her trust. “He’s going to have to show up for her in every way possible,” says Tung. “People are really quick to pass judgment. And I understand, because obviously Jeremiah messed up and is now trying to prove that he will be there for Belly every step of the way.”

Adds Casalegno, “Jeremiah is reckoning with the consequences of those mistakes, but at the root of their relationship, he cares deeply about Belly. I think trials and bumps in the road are a part of life and also the best relationships. How can something be valuable if it hasn’t been tested?”

The 25-year-old actor, who himself got married last year, has some advice for Jeremiah and Belly, should they make it down the aisle. “Relationships are about communication and selflessness,” he says. “The less you worry about yourself and really care for the other, the better and smoother it’ll go. Try your best to over communicate and really voice how you feel, even the harder thoughts that might hurt.”

By Lenne Chai/Amazon MGM Studios.

Tung is diplomatic when asked whether Belly and Jeremiah are mature enough to marry. “Everybody has a different timeline, and they do love each other very, very much,” she says. “So who am I to say?” She also wants to defend Jeremiah against the fans outraged that he proposed without getting down on one knee—or providing a ring. “It is one of those spur-of-the-moment things,” says Tung. “In that moment they both are just like, We don’t need physical things. We don’t need anything else but the two of us right here, right now. And I think there’s something special about that.”

Casalegno says popping the question has been “stirring in Jeremiah’s mind for a while now,” adding, “Maybe it wasn’t the most romantic, but I do think it was genuine and from the heart. There’s a famous song verse that says, ‘You don’t know what you got till it’s gone,’ and I think he was able to live that out.”

Han seconds this motion: “People who were upset that there wasn’t a ring, it’s because he didn’t have that plan.” And viewers would be wise to remember that both Belly and Jeremiah have bonded over their respective familial trauma. “When you experience something of that magnitude, it puts into sharp focus what’s really important in life,” says Han. “They are each other’s number one person, and they’ve been together in college for the past three years too. So they haven’t really been tested in the sense of being apart from each other.” That may come this season, when Belly takes a study abroad trip to Paris. When asked if she can reveal how many of Belly’s potential travels we’ll see, Han replies simply: “No.”

In the Summer I Turned Pretty universe, characters of all ages have messy relationships. Just ask Belly’s estranged parents, Laurel (Jackie Chung) and John (Colin Ferguson), who briefly rekindle their romance in the season’s second episode. “They are now without some of the trickier parts of their relationship, which is raising the kids. The pressure is off because they’re able to just have fun together,” says Han. “But I guess the question is: Should you explore an old love, or maybe just let it stay in your memory?”

That’s also the query haunting Belly at the season’s start. While dealing with Jeremiah drama in the present, her mind wanders to that holiday break she spent with Conrad, as Sufjan Stevens’s evocative “Mystery of Love” plays. “I love how people have really responded to that too,” says Han, “because, to me, it feels like a memory itself, that song—like reaching back into your past and remembering somebody. It’s just lovely and haunting and so romantic. I played it on set that day because I wanted them to have that feeling in their hearts in the scene. I think of [it] as a snowglobe moment that’s trapped in this perfect little memory that you can hold and sort of shake up and look at every once in a while.”

Fans have been especially tickled to see Easter eggs scattered throughout the first two episodes, including references to Han’s other best-known work, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which spawned a trio of Netflix movies and an ongoing spin-off series, XO Kitty. “I love anytime when I can give the original book reader something that is important to them,” says Han. “It makes me really happy to see them happy.”

That passion for her original source material is what led Han to tackle a new role in The Summer I Turned Pretty’s third season, as a first-time director on one very special episode. “I guess I can say that there are moments that the readers have been really looking forward to—so I wanted to be the one to do it,” she explains. Even the vaguest of answers feel revealing to the tight-lipped author, who confesses, “I think I’ve said a lot more than I’ve ever said” about the new season during our interview.

By Lenne Chai/Amazon MGM Studios.

Tung has been similarly coy about who Belly will ultimately choose. (For what it’s worth—book spoiler alert!—Han originally wrote her picking Conrad.) “I’m always Team Belly. So wherever she wants to go, I’ll follow her,” the actor says. “The reason that I love this season so much is because you get to see her truly figuring out what she wants to do—what that looks like with someone else and on her own. Being in your twenties is such an experimental time, and it doesn’t mean you’re going to get everything right. I’ve always felt with Belly: I’m going to make a decision, and it might not always be the right decision, but at least it’s mine.”

Taylor Swift provides the unofficial soundtrack to The Summer I Turned Pretty. So in lieu of any actual spoilers, I ask Tung to divulge a Swift track that teases the remainder of the season. “‘Nothing New’ feels relevant,” she says, referring to the Red-era vault song about aging in the public eye, which Swift sings with Phoebe Bridgers. Tung quotes one particularly resonant lyric: “‘How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?’ It’s the truth!”

That song also rings true for the 22-year-old Tung, who made her onscreen debut with The Summer I Turned Pretty after completing a year of training at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. “I still feel like my career is only beginning. And then you have some people who say stuff like they’re already sort of tired of you,” she says. “I felt so old at 18, and now I feel almost like a child again sometimes.”

Time has a funny way of catching up with the show’s soulful adolescents, and Briney suspects it will be key if Conrad and Jeremiah ever have a functional sibling relationship when all of this is over. “All in due time. They are brothers, at the end of the day,” says the actor. Although he admits “it’ll probably be weird for a while no matter what.” As for what else lies ahead, Briney says only this: “Shit will hit the fan. Don’t worry, guys.”

Belly (Lola Tung), Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), Conrad (Christopher Briney), Steven (Sean Kaufman), and Taylor (Rain Spencer) in The Summer I Turned Pretty season 3.ERIKA DOSS

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