A lot of Hayley Kiyoko’s teenage summers were spent waiting, bored and pining, as she sat at the computer willing her crush to message her back on AOL instant messenger. Like Coley, the 17-year-old protagonist of Girls Like Girls, the film the pop star has co-written and directed, Kiyoko fell hard for a girl who “put me through my own heartbreak and haunted me for a long time”, she says. Although the 35-year-old singer became known by fans as “lesbian Jesus” following the release of her breakthrough single Girls Like Girls in 2015 (the film is an extended version of the story first told in the song’s music video), feeling comfortable in her sexuality didn’t actually come until after its release.
Her gay identity was, at the time, the topic she was “the most scared of writing about”, and the song’s confident refrain “Girls like girls like boys do, nothing new” came from wanting to “manifest feeling confident”. After directing the music video, in which two teenage girls, one of whom has a boyfriend, develop romantic feelings for one another, Kiyoko became “very fixated on being able to tell this story on a feature film level”. It took just over a decade to make that happen, with a “pivot” to a different form in between, via the publication of Girls Like Girls the YA romance novel in 2023, which helped to get the film greenlit.
The film is “definitely a love letter to my younger 16-, 17-year-old self who desperately was seeking that kind of love,” Kiyoko tells me via Zoom, dialling in from Bangkok where she has been celebrating the film’s Thailand release. The sun is shining on her and her eyes are bright as she excitedly tells me about meeting her Thai fans for the first time. The Bangkok screening was “super-special” because one of the film’s stars, Myra Molloy, who plays Coley’s love interest Sonya, is from Bangkok, Kiyoko says.
The Canadian actor who plays Coley, Maya da Costa, has Vietnamese heritage: it was important to Kiyoko to create not just a queer love story, but one that reflected her Asian heritage, too. Growing up in Los Angeles, “I never was able to buy a ticket at a cinema and see myself reflected back to me in my own experience as a queer person, as a mixed-race Asian person,” she says (Kiyoko is of Japanese descent on her mother’s side). Her father, Jamie Alcroft, is an actor and comedian, while her mother is the figure skater and Emmy award-winning choreographer Sarah Kawahara.
Kiyoko herself has been performing since she was five, initially as an actor in commercials and later Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows. She started learning the drums at six years old and wrote her first song at eight. In her late teens, she was part of the all-girl band the Stunners, which supported Justin Bieber in 2010 but broke up a year later without having released an album.
Kiyoko’s solo career took off after she released Girls Like Girls as a single, which happened to be just days before same-sex marriage was legalised by the US federal government in June 2015. Back then it felt like an appropriate anthem for a time full of hope and steps forward for the LGBTQ+ community. Now, however, the picture is less positive: there has been a major increase in the number of anti-LGBTQ+ policies across the US in recent years, with the American Civil Liberties Union tracking more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills being considered so far in 2026 alone.
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