Cazzie David has a hot take: “I’ve been wanting TikTok to end for years now. I’ve hated it since its birth.” The 30-year-old writer, actor, and director also doesn’t believe men should be able to celebrate their birthday and is staunchly against riding on two wheels. David, as we’ve come to learn over the years, is full of these refreshingly honest and hilarious opinions. She’s your millennial best friend who, whether she’s doling out dating advice or airing her neuroses on the internet, always gives it to you straight. It’s that authenticity that has become the multi-hyphenate’s calling card.
Since debuting her 2017 web series Eighty-Sixed, the Los Angeles native has been serving up clever and honest content that actually speaks to our generation. Known for her self-deprecating humor and authentic portrayal of what it is to be a young woman today (we highly recommend her hilarious book of essays No One Asked for This), David is cutting through the noise with truly original storytelling, and her latest project—the subversive rom-com I Love You Forever—is further proof of her genius.
Disclaimer: A Cazzie David rom-com is not your typical rom-com. But that’s the beauty of it.
It may start out like one—girl has a meet-cute with handsome and impossibly charming boy at a party and falls quickly for boy—but just as boy and girl are on their way to happily ever after, the story quickly veers left into horrifying and, for some, all-too-familiar territory.
I Love You Forever follows law student Mackenzie (Sofia Black-D’Elia), who is struggling to find any viable romantic prospects. She meets broadcast journalist Finn (Ray Nicholson), and he quickly sweeps her off her feet with an abundance of love and sweet gestures. As things start getting serious, Finn’s vulnerability, at first an endearing quality, reveals itself to be a more sinister tool of gaslighting and manipulation, throwing their relationship into chaos.
“The goal was to make something that you could give to someone who’s entering a relationship like this and be like, ‘You need to watch this,'” David says of co-writing and co-directing I Love You Forever with longtime creative partner Elisa Kalani. (Note: David also stars in the film.) With this project, David and Kalani set out to create something grounded in a realistic portrayal of an emotionally abusive relationship, a topic that is personal to David. “It was the kind of thing where everything that I had watched when I had gone through something similar was either about domestic violence or ended in a car chase or murder, and it just wasn’t relatable. I was just so desperate to watch something that made me feel seen,” David says.
(Image credit: WWW)
If a romantic comedy about emotional abuse in a relationship sounds like an oxymoron, that’s sort of the point. What David and Kalani do well is ultimately prove that the two coincide really well. “Ironically, both these things start out the same,” David explains. “In all the movies we’ve ever seen, they start out with this excessive flattery or relentless pursuit by a guy who you think is a fairytale, and it’s the same thing with textbook abusive relationships. They really start out the same.” From there, she tells me, the rest of the story fell into place.
While writing I Love You Forever, David and Kalani were influenced by movies like Twilight and The Notebook where the leading man is this perfect specimen as well as the groundedness of Nora Ephron films. They were also struck by the culture’s overuse of such words as “toxic,” “red flags,” “love-bombing,” and “gaslighting”—popular vernacular relating to emotional abuse. “Our generation is super obsessed with toxic men,” David says. “It’s been a trend for a while to be drawn to that and to talk about that you’re drawn to that.” David goes on to say that we use these words so regularly they’ve started to lose meaning, but I Love You Forever was a way to show what those words actually mean without even mentioning them.
The research process for the film proved cathartic for David. She dove deep into narcissistic and psychological abuse with books such as Patricia Evans’s The Verbally Abusive Relationship and Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger’s Stop Walking on Eggshells. Prior to shooting, she met with many people who had gone through similar experiences to her own. When you’re in it, she tells me, “it can be isolating and confusing,” but talking to others made David feel sane. “It became clear that this is an epidemic,” she says. What’s shocking to her is that the topic still remains taboo. Never mind its lack of representation in media—it’s not something we’re ever taught or warned against growing up.
I Love You Forever is successful in getting its message across, but Hollywood execs and financiers weren’t always so receptive. David tells me it took about five years to get the project off the ground and that the key was finding just one person in the room who could personally connect with the subject matter. “The main thing we were talking about is [that] nobody’s going to buy this unless they’ve been abused,” David says with a sarcastic tone. They were right, and eventually, someone did relate. “They were like, ‘Yeah, I totally get this, and it’s important,'” she adds.
Trying to break through in an industry hell-bent on striking lightning twice, three times, and even four times instead of taking a new risk is David’s uphill battle. Thankfully, she isn’t easily discouraged. “I know people say everything’s been done, and that’s partly true, but I don’t think it’s even scratched the surface when it comes to our modern culture,” she says. David’s main objective is to write comedic stories that feel as original as possible and that her peers can relate to, and we, as the audience, get to reap the benefits of this endless pursuit. “I feel really lucky to be able to write during this time where there’s an entire new world of material that feels untapped thanks to the misery of our phones,” she adds.
David has her own complicated love-hate relationship with her phone and social media. She loves Instagram—like a true millennial—and there’s her aforementioned hatred of TikTok. Indeed, the app’s dramatic 12-hour ban that took place just days before our interview was of no concern to her. She does eventually admit that her disdain for the social app is purely for selfish reasons. If she can’t speak to a camera alone, nobody should be able to do it either.
(Image credit: WWW)
In an attempt to establish healthier screen habits, David set a 2025 New Year’s resolution to get off her phone more, but that failed two weeks into the year when the simultaneous Palisades and Eaton fires caused unimaginable devastation in Los Angeles. David, like most Angelenos, was glued to the Watch Duty app for updates, sending her screen time soaring.
She’s now vowing to redo New Year’s and start again.
Persistence, it turns out, is David’s superpower. When I ask what she has brewing next, David tells me she and Kalani are still working on a TV show that they’ve been trying to get made for about nine years. Instead of moving on, they are pivoting to an independent route to get the project out, a familiar reality for up-and-coming writers such as herself.
“No matter who you are, it’s really impossible to get something made right now,” David says. “It feels so much [more] about timing, luck, and [whether] you have current buzz than the actual talent or the quality of the work, so it has been crazy to grow up while trying to do it and watching it and learning so much about how Hollywood works.”
If you think David can lean on her familial connections for any guidance—her father is legendary comedian and serial grump Larry David—you’d be wrong. “My dad gives us the worst advice ever,” she says. “It’s kind of like asking for dating advice from a supermodel. He’ll be like, ‘Just quit, and they won’t let you walk away. Just say no.’ And I’m like, ‘They absolutely will let me walk away.'”
It’s a tough business and even tougher place to create your own identity as a filmmaker, but David has managed just that without wavering from a place that is genuine and always humorous. It’s why we’re over here impatiently awaiting her next big hot take.
I Love You Forever is showing in select theaters on February 14.
Talent: Cazzie David
Photographer: Emma Louise Swanson
Stylist: Carolina Orrico
Hairstylist: Kiley Fitzgerald
Makeup Artist: Lilly Keys
Manicurist: Olivia de Montagnac
Creative Director: Sarah Chiarot
Editorial Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
Layout Designer: Ally Quirk
Copy Editor: Jaree Campbell
