The Actual Tennis in Challengers Is Kind of a Serve

It’s hard to make actors look like athletes. A real athlete has training, nutrition, hyperspecific sports medicine, and years of muscle memory on their side; an actor gets weeks or a few months of training at most. Luca Guadagnino’s new movie Challengers — in addition to being a movie about three-way sexual desires and strange weather patterns in Westchester County — is all about tennis, a sport that requires specific skills and becomes infinitely more complex in the upper echelons where its characters compete.