


Do you remember what 2003 looked like? No need for a time machine — instead, just press play on the first two minutes of Your Place or Mine. In the new film, Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher star as Debbie and Peter, longtime friends living on different coasts who swap homes and lives for a week. But the opening scene, available now only on Tudum, takes you all the way back to the early-aughts drunken hookup that launched their relationship.
Set to the familiar “woohoos” of Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape” ft. Akon, the prologue shows Debbie and Peter making out after a game of poker. Captions run through all the hallmarks of a 2003 hang: trucker hats, pin-straight flat-ironed hair, wallet chains and layer upon layer of pointless clothing.




“I hadn’t initially planned to point out all those things, but it just seemed really fun to play with the fashion and the trends of the time,” writer-director Aline Brosh McKenna tells Tudum. “It’s a tribute to my collaborators because the wallet chain and [all] the T-shirts and the WonderBra — they really nailed that time period.”
The date isn’t just a giddy blast of nostalgia. With the opening scene, McKenna also wanted to highlight the changes in the way people interact with each other. Though 2003 is still a relatively analog moment, it’s right on the cusp of a revolution that would forever alter our ability to connect instantly and often. “It’s [still] an era where they meet in person through happenstance — friends of friends having a poker game,” she says. “And then they maintain their relationship the way that we all do now, through these electronic means.”
The pop-fueled opening sequence immediately gives the audience context for Debbie and Peter’s friendship, which has evolved and matured by the time we meet them again two decades later. “I wanted it to feel weirdly familiar,” McKenna says. “It’s this idea that you can meet somebody at random and then they can become a really important part of your life.”
So first comes hookup, then comes… well, you’ll just have to wait and find out when Your Place or Mine streams on Netflix on Feb. 10.































































































