Based on a true story told in a popular twitter thread containing 148 tweets written by Detroit waitress A'Ziah "Zola" King in October 2015. The story quickly went viral, garnering the recognition of people such as Missy Elliott, Solange and Ava DuVernay. About a month later, Rolling Stone magazine published an article interviewing people involved in the story.
To prepare for the role of Zola, Taylour Paige, who is a native of Inglewood, Calif., worked at Crazy Girls on Sunset and La Brea as a stripper for a month and actually took her clothes off onstage. Paige said the job proved both beneficial as research and as a source of income. She said, "I actually really needed the money. I was like, 'Fuck it. Why don't I just go in undercover and see what this is like?'" It turned out to be much more of an emotionally shaping experience than she anticipated. "I just wanted to have a sense of agency before I left to go do the movie, and what better place than working in a strip club where it's eat or be eaten? I didn't want to look like an actor trying to dance, I didn't want to look like a dancer trying to strip, I wanted to look like this person in the given circumstances who works at a restaurant and also dances." She added she also wanted to be "completely uninhibited, with no judgment."
Each "tweet" sound in the film indicates a direct quote or moment that was taken from the original Twitter thread
During Riley Keough's 2021 interview with Sam Sanders on National Public Radio, Sanders reported that Keough "had to get special training on how to play a white woman trying very offensively to sound a certain type of 'black.'"
Riley Keough's portrayal of Stefani is supposed to make the audience squirm. As co-star Taylour Paige put it, Keough's "in blackface" for the whole film, complete with a blaccent. Keough made it clear that cultural appropriation was a huge part of the conversation between herself and director Janicza Bravo.