Lara Jean Covey and Peter Kavinsky are in a relationship. A real one this time.
Audiences met Lara Jean (Lana Condor), the quirky teen with a love of romance, and Peter (Noah Centineo), the Jeep-driving jock with a heart of gold, in 2018’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Based on the 2014 best-selling novel by Jenny Han, the Netflix film followed its heroine through the biggest crisis of her love life: Her little sister mailed out the secret letters Lara Jean had written to boys over the years. And when her current crush received one, Lara Jean entered into a fake relationship with Peter, an old crush who also received a letter. But their pretend relationship lasted about as long as Lara Jean’s plan to drive to school. By film’s end, they’d fallen for each other — almost as fast as audiences fell for them.
The film caused a social media uproar, making names out of its stars and winning rom-com lovers over with its lighthearted spirit and refreshingly unjaded take on young love. With three books in Han’s series, Netflix quickly got to work on the rest of the trilogy. And when To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (out Feb. 12) picks up, Lara Jean and Peter are giving this real-relationship thing a try.
“Jenny constructed a book trilogy starting with Lara Jean alone in her room, reading romance novels and fantasizing about what it means to be in love, to getting that, and now [in the sequel], dealing with it,” says director Michael Fimognari. “And we still have the little drop in the pond that was created in the first movie, which is these love letters that got sent out, and the ripple of that gets to come back.”
That ripple is John Ambrose McClaren, a character viewers met at the end of the first film who is now played by Jordan Fisher (Fox’s Rent and Grease Live). John’s arrival will force Lara Jean to figure whether her feelings for him are only a thing of the past. “They’re true friends,” Condor says of Lara Jean and John. “But because you can love your friend very much, you get confused. You’re like, ‘Do I love him or do I love him as a friend?’ So he’s really there to mix it up.”
But John will do more than simply mix things up. Make no mistake: He’s here to steal Peter’s girl. As Fimognari puts it, “We certainly want there to be a Team Peter and a Team John.”
EW has exclusive first-look images from the sequel, along with a look at the new movie tie-in book cover for Jenny Han’s P.S. I Still Love You, below:
