Zoey Deutch plays Rose Hathaway, a half-human/half-vampire teenager in Vampire Academy, the latest young adult fantasy series to make its way onto the big screen.

Zoey Deutch On Lesbian Vampires

Much of Vampire Academy focuses on the bond between Deutch’s character Rose and her best friend Lissa Dragomir (Lucy Fry). Vampire stories have a history of including lesbian subtext – or lesbian plots in the main text. Though the film includes suggestive bloodsucking between the two stars, Deutch claims that the relationship between Rose and Lissa is purely platonic and not a result of genre clichés.

“Are you saying undertones of lesbian lovers? I think you do see [that] in a lot of vampire movies,” Deutch told Uinterview of Rose and Lissa’s relationship. “The relationship they have between each other is that they don’t have anyone but one another. The movie actually begins with the audience seeing that Lissa’s parents and brother were killed in a car crash and Rose was in the car and survived it – as well as Lissa, obviously. And Rose comes from a kind of screwed up family where she doesn’t talk to them, doesn’t know them. She doesn’t know her dad and she barely talks to her mother, so they really have each other and this school. And this school they have to leave, and they don’t even remember why. That’s it; that’s all they have.”

To Deutch, Vampire Academy manages to transcend the tropes of other movies and films it’s likely to be compared to. “It didn’t feel necessarily like a vampire film. It felt more like a story about a friendship between two girls and their survival – beyond even just trying to get through the mean girls, the boys and each other,” the 19-year-old actress told Uinterview. “They have these actually threatening forces surrounding them.”

“It’s about friendship between two girls,” Deutch said, “prioritizing of each other over a relationship with a guy.”