Troye Sivan, out pop star, is no stranger to the big screen – the actor has appeared in Boy Erased, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and more – but now he's making his leading man debut in the new coming-of-age film Three Months. The 26-year-old is pretty selective about the films he appears in, but he couldn't be happier to be a part of this one.
"I fell in love with the script and I fell in love with Caleb pretty much immediately, he really jumped off the page," Sivan tells PRIDE. "It can feel a little bit frivolous sometimes to make a pop song or make a movie especially when the world is melting down, so anytime I come across something that I think has the potential to, first of all, be a great movie and would be fun to make, but also [has] the potential to actually affect some change or show people themselves on the screen... it was just very, very exciting to me."
Three Months follows Caleb (Sivan), a Florida teen who receives a text from a one-night stand that he just tested positive for HIV. Now Caleb must get tested, but as HIV can take up to three months to show up in the body, he spends his summer before going off to college anxiously waiting. Those three months are not without drama: his best friend and coworker Dara (Brianne Tju) is hooking up with their boss (Judy Greer), and Caleb quickly falls for another boy (Viveik Kalra) who is also waiting for his test results.
One of the biggest missions of the film is to address the fear and stigma people have with not only contracting HIV, but living with it. At one point, Caleb's love interest Estha says he would rather he get cancer than HIV because at least he wouldn't feel like his diagnosis was his fault. Three Months is chock-full of heartbreaking moments that highlight the fear of judgment that comes with contracting HIV, especially jarring juxtaposed to the modern reality of living with it.
Writer and director Jared Frieder hopes the film educates queer and straight people alike that "HIV is no longer a death sentence when you have access to modern medical care. One of the last hurdles we have is to really fight the shame and the stigma against it because it's so prevalent in our culture right now."
"I think a lot of people don't know that undetectable means untransmittable," Sivan agrees. "For me, I just had such poor sex education" that he hopes this film "sparks conversations that aren't previously had. For example, I'm well into my twenties now, but my parents didn't know what PrEP was until we started talking about the movie. And I was like, 'yeah, I'm on this medication that you take every day.'
"It's just so much ignorance, you know? And so I really hope that this a little resource for people."
As a native Floridian, this queer story has always felt important for Frieder to put out into the world. "In the public school system there, we were not taught about the historical homophobic context of the global pandemic of aids in the eighties and nineties. And a lot of the shame that I felt around my sexuality and gay sex and HIV was sort of rooted in that homophobia. And it's really important that we have a dialogue and a conversation about it especially 'cause right now in the Florida house, they just passed a Don't Say Gay bill, where literally now in public schools you can't even say the word gay. It's still happening and it's 2022."
The content could be quite heavy, but Three Months feels refreshingly hopeful. Usually, when HIV is portrayed in movies and on TV, we're used to the doom and gloom. In this film, whether Caleb ends up HIV+ or not, "he's gonna be okay, he's gonna live a long, happy life. He's going to find his joy," says Frieder. "He's gonna find love and as his grandma says, maybe even more than once. He's gonna pursue his dreams and just see his picture of happiness come true."
Sivan summarizes, "I think it's important that these heavy, intense, sad, HIV movies exist. But it's also like, where are we today? And let's acknowledge that, you know, let's celebrate that!"
Three Months is available to stream now on Paramount Plus. Watch our interview below:
