In Netflix’s new romantic comedy The Perfect Find, Gabrielle Union plays Jenna Jones, a 40-year-old woman attempting to pick up the pieces after losing her fashion industry job and long-term boyfriend. A first look of the film has been shared, featuring photos of Gab as Jenna and her eventual love interest Eric, played by Keith Powers. He’s a younger co-worker at the job that marks her fashion comeback and also her boss’s son. The film will follow Jenna as she decides whether her secret romance is worth taking the risk.
Gabrielle says the idea for the film came to her as she and her I’ll Have Another production company were producing Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, “a very specific story to an aging white woman.”
“I knew it wasn’t something I could just shove myself into, because it really wasn’t the right story for me,” Gab tells Vanity Fair. “It made me be on the lookout for a story that made me feel the same way.” After re-reading Tia Williams’s novel The Perfect Find, a lightbulb went off. The story also hit close to home.
“[It] really sparked something inside of me about older women and how we can oftentimes disappear from society, almost, in terms of people looking at us as like we are past our prime. That we carry no value, that no one sees value in a woman over 28, much less over 35, much less over 40,” says Union, who also serves as a producer on the film. “But baby, I’m thriving. So I wanted something that spoke to that I hadn’t done before. Which is tough, because I’ve done a lot of rom-coms. This one is new. I’m thrilled.”
The Perfect Find premieres on June 23.
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