How Pandemic Love Stories Inspired Katie Holmes’ Latest Film

Love can blossom in the most unexpected of times.

That’s a theme Katie Holmes explores in her new movie Alone Together, which premiered July 22. When developing the rom-com set during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the actress exclusively told E! News’ Daily Pop that she was inspired by people’s pandemic love stories…good and the bad.

“The inspiration behind the film really came from a lot of the stories that I read about—all of these different stories on Reddit and this and that,” she told Daily Pop‘s Francesca Amiker on July 22. “It was really either people falling in love quickly or people, unfortunately, breaking up, ending their marriages.”

With the amount of pain the world has gone through over the past few years, the 43-year-old shared that she “wanted to tell a story about people coming together as opposed to falling apart.”

The movie follows Holmes’ character June, who arrives at the Airbnb her boyfriend (Derek Luke) rented in upstate New York only to discover it was accidentally double-booked. And after her BF bails on the trip out of the city, she forms an unexpected connection with the house’s other tenant, Charlie, played by Jim Sturgess.