Neil Patrick Harris & Director George Jaques on the Messiness of Growing Up in Sunny Dancer

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For Neil Patrick Harris and writer-director George Jaques, Sunny Dancer is as much about growing up as it is about everything that can complicate it.

Set at a summer camp for young people affected by cancer, the film follows Ivy as she enters a community where the people around her understand parts of her experience without needing an explanation. Jaques wanted to explore everything that can come after treatment, while Harris was drawn to how naturally the film balances those heavier experiences with humor, friendship and the everyday awkwardness of being young.

“I love how human the story is,” Harris says. “The dialogue itself feels very conversational and naturalistic.”

That approach is established from the film’s opening corkscrew shot, which introduces Ivy in a childhood bedroom that still feels deeply hers even as she has started to outgrow it. For Jaques, the visual was also a way of signaling that Sunny Dancer wouldn’t necessarily follow the conventions audiences might expect.

“Everything you think you know about a cancer film, we try and change and shift.”

Rather than focusing on treatment itself, Jaques was interested in what happens afterward. His work with Teenage Cancer Trust introduced him to young people whose experiences with illness, grief, survivor’s guilt and recovery were all deeply individual.

“This film only represents a few people. It won’t represent everyone, but I think there’s themes in it that we all feel seen in, whether you’ve had cancer or not.”

Jaques was particularly interested in the complicated expectations that can come with remission. Being told that you’re lucky doesn’t erase anger or grief, especially when friends may not have had the same outcome.

“There’s moments where you want to be angry and there’s moments you want to scream that your mate passed away on a ward, and there’s moments you want to be horny and mess up and make mistakes.”

For Jaques, giving the characters the agency to experience all of those emotions was essential.

Both he and Harris were also interested in the unusual position the campers find themselves in. Many have been forced to confront grief and mortality much earlier than their peers while simultaneously missing ordinary teenage experiences during years spent in hospitals and treatment.

“They felt so beyond their years,” Jaques says. “But then on the flip side, [they] had missed out a huge part and felt really young too.”

The camp creates a place where those sides of their lives can finally coexist. As Harris points out, it gives them the opportunity to do things that have nothing to do with hospitals, from archery and rock climbing to building tents and simply spending time with people their own age.

Patrick enthusiastically throws himself into creating that environment for them, although Harris initially had to determine just how far to take his character’s relentlessly upbeat personality.

“I wasn’t sure how cringe to be.”

Harris knew Patrick needed to be awkward enough to believably embarrass a group of teenagers while still feeling like a real person. He and Jaques eventually found a middle ground, with Harris joking that embarrassing his own children gave him some useful experience.

That collaboration also shaped Patrick’s welcome jingle. Jaques had written the basic idea into the script, but Harris began sending him voice notes ahead of filming to work out how it might actually sound.

“I was so grateful to have Neil because I’m so unmusical,” Jaques says. “You managed to make it this whole jingle.”

As Ivy settles into camp, her relationship with the people around her gradually changes. She initially keeps everything close to her chest, while her roommate Ella is almost her complete opposite. Jaques wanted those relationships to work in both directions, with the other campers influencing Ivy while she also begins changing them.

“I sort of believe characters should do both things.”

Ivy’s insistence that the campers should still be allowed to live their lives eventually begins influencing Patrick too. Jaques points to Patrick allowing them to go on a night out as something he likely never would have agreed to when Ivy first arrived.

The supporting characters were just as important to showing how differently each person responds to life after cancer. Jaques and the cast spent months developing histories for them, including their hobbies, favorite songs, school experiences and the parts of adolescence they had missed.

Those details were passed along to the costume, makeup and production design departments. When it came time for camp, the actors were even able to pack their characters’ own bags using clothes and objects informed by those backstories.

“It just felt so textured and just felt lived in.”

The preparation also allowed the film to avoid having its characters constantly explain their shared experiences to one another. Some campers have known each other for years, complete with inside jokes and histories that Ivy doesn’t initially understand. The audience enters that world alongside her.

“You want to be part of that gang, but you don’t know the joke that they’re making,” Jaques says. “You’re really with Ivy.”

Jaques also found an unexpected parallel between the characters and the actors playing them. Many members of his young cast had spent significant parts of their childhoods working on sets, giving them their own experience of missing some of the ordinary parts of adolescence.

While careful not to equate that experience with cancer, Jaques saw the production itself become a chance for the cast to spend six weeks together and experience some of the same freedom and camaraderie their characters find at camp.

“This camp meant so much for my characters on screen, but also my cast off screen.”

All of that helped build Ivy’s gradual progression throughout the film. Her parents love her and want to help, but part of her journey requires stepping outside of the space they have created for her and figuring out who she is beyond what she has been through.

Jaques wanted to keep that evolution firmly rooted in Ivy’s perspective. He even removed a scene between her parents during the edit because, despite liking the moment, he realized the film needed to stay with her.

“This is her journey, not theirs,” he says.

Working with Bella on that arc became a similarly collaborative process. As they developed Ivy together, Jaques found that their conversations about the character grew increasingly detailed, extending into pieces of her life that would never necessarily appear on screen.

By the end, he remembers Bella discussing everything from Ivy’s childhood hobbies to specific moments in her past, giving them an even richer understanding of who she was beyond the events of the film.

“That was so cool that we got to create that world together,” Jaques says.

For Harris, understanding Patrick’s own history became equally important. While preparing for one of his most personal conversations with Ivy, he asked Jaques how often Patrick might have shared this part of himself with campers before.

The question helped them explore what it would take for Patrick to let his usual camp-leader persona fall away and meet Ivy on a more personal level.

“He saw something in Ivy and knew that if he revealed a little bit more about himself, she may wake up to some things that she hadn’t been paying attention to.”

That quieter side of Patrick becomes even more important near the end of the film, when he has to tell Ivy about Jake’s death.

Harris imagined that Patrick had likely faced similarly difficult moments at camp before. That experience informed the steadiness he brings to the scene, particularly against the intensity of Ivy’s reaction.

Harris also drew from his own response to frightening or high-pressure situations.

“I get very calm and pretty focused,” he says. “I’m not a panicker.”

Jaques remembers being struck by that contrast on set, with Harris becoming increasingly calm as Bella’s performance moved in the opposite direction.

“It still gives me goosebumps how good you are in that scene,” Jaques tells him.

For Harris, keeping Patrick grounded allowed the emotion of the moment to come from Ivy while he focused on the difficult responsibility in front of him.

“We have to be honest about it and be as real as we can, to be as kind as we can.”

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