By Katherine Tinsley
4:50pm PDT, Jul 24, 2025
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The Summer I Turned Pretty creator
Jenny Han is opening up about the challenges of creating storylines for the third season.
Keep reading to see what she had to say…
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In the third season, the love triangle between Belly, Conrad and Jeremiah — who are portrayed by
Lola Tung,
Christopher Briney and
Gavin Casalegno, respectively — remains the core focus. However, Jenny Han revealed that another on-screen romance — the one between
Rain Spencer's Taylor and
Sean Kaufman's Steven — was more difficult to craft. "That might have been one of the most challenging parts of writing the season, because there's so many places they can go, and we did have that time gap," she told
TheWrap.
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The relationship between Rain Spencer's and Sean Kaufman's characters isn't fully captured on The Summer I Turned Pretty, though Jenny Han fleshed out their full story in her book trilogy. "We wrote a lot of story that we never even see on screen, just so that we knew what the history was, and we knew where the fault lines were … in the relationship," she said.
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Jenny Han noted that Rain Spencer's Taylor had a crush on Sean Kaufman's Steven, but the characters' ties to Lola Tung's Belly made things complicated. "It's a really rich story with a lot of backstory to it, even before the third season, because we knew that Taylor had a crush on Steven since they were little, and she was Belly's best friend but she never told him or anybody," she said. "To me that's always such juicy fodder for a relationship … the 'she fell first, he fell harder' [element] — I think they kind of epitomize that."
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Taylor and Steven ended the second season in a relationship, but things proved to be rocky for the duo at the beginning of the third season. Fans of the series will see if the lovebirds can sustain their romance while navigating Belly's feelings and young adulthood.
