Gabrielle Union Is in Her Prime in ‘The Perfect Find’

Plenty of ink has been spilled over the supposed death of the romantic comedy, but Gabrielle Union is here to start a new chapter. Vanity Fair has your first look at The Perfect Find, an old-school-style rom-com with a fresh perspective that stars Union and hits Netflix on June 23.  

Ironically, Union was busy producing a rom-com for another A-list actor when she was inspired to make her own. Her production company, I’ll Have Another, had recently optioned Robinne Lee’s The Idea of You, “a very specific story to an aging white woman,” Union says over the phone. “I knew it wasn’t something I could just shove myself into, because it really wasn’t the right story for me…. We got Michael Showalter and Anne Hathaway and Cathy Schulman, and it was up and running.” (The Idea of You does not have a release Date.)

Still, the process left Union with an itch she needed to scratch. “It made me be on the lookout for a story that made me feel the same way, basically,” she says. Enter Tia Williams’s 2016 novel, The Perfect Find, which was suggested to Union by producer Tommy Oliver. “I’d already read it. I love that book. I love Tia. She’s the shit. We have mutual friends,” Union says. “I’m like, Oh, my God, why didn’t I think of that?”

The lush romantic comedy, from Jezebel director Numa Perrier, stars Union as Jenna Jones, a 40-year-old woman whose seemingly perfect life crumbles after she loses both her high-powered fashion industry job and her long-term boyfriend. “I was just at a point in my life where I had gone through a work loss and a love loss at the same time, just like Jenna did in the book,” Perrier tells me over the phone. “I really deeply related to the whole feeling of trying to piece yourself back together.” For Jenna, that chapter involves getting kicked out by her mother—The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Janet Hubert—moving to Brooklyn, and taking a job as a fashion editor at a brand run by her frenemy, Darcy (Gina Torres). 

Jenna also winds up falling into a May-December flirtation with her Gen Z coworker and Darcy’s son, Eric, played by Keith Powers. “The only person that was on every single person’s list in top one or two position was Keith,” Union says of nabbing Powers, a breakout from Straight Outta Compton. “Everyone was like, Okay, that might be a slightly younger person that people might throw it all away for.”

Chemistry is vitally important to a romantic comedy, and Powers and Union have it in spades. It helps that they were already friends before filming: Union and her husband, former NBA star Dwyane Wade, were impressed by how Powers and his now ex-girlfriend, actor Ryan Destiny, handled their public Relationship at a relatively young age. “We were openly fanning about Ryan and Keith, and just loving how they moved through Hollywood, how they handled their relationship, how they handled the public love,” she says. “It was just kind of a natural progression of a friendship that already existed, but it comes out of respect. He has an enormous amount of respect for Dwyane, I have an enormous amount of respect for Ryan, and it just made working super easy.”