Zendaya&x27;s "The Drama "Director Under Fire for Resurfaced Essay About Dating a Teenager While He Was 27 Tommy McArdleFri, March 27, 2026 at 9:38 PM UTC 0 Kristoffer Borgli at the Italian premiere of The Drama on March 26, 2026Credit: Antonietta Baldassarre Insidefoto/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty The director behind Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's new movie The Drama is receiving criticism after an essay he wrote in 2012 about a relationship with a teenager resurfaced online Kristoffer Borgli, 40, detailed his relationship with a high schoolaged girl in a Norwegian magazine in 2012 The essay...
Zendaya's "The Drama "Director Under Fire for Resurfaced Essay About Dating a Teenager While He Was 27
Tommy McArdleFri, March 27, 2026 at 9:38 PM UTC
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Kristoffer Borgli at the Italian premiere of The Drama on March 26, 2026Credit: Antonietta Baldassarre Insidefoto/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty -
The director behind Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's new movie The Drama is receiving criticism after an essay he wrote in 2012 about a relationship with a teenager resurfaced online
Kristoffer Borgli, 40, detailed his relationship with a high school-aged girl in a Norwegian magazine in 2012
The essay resurfaced on Reddit just over a week before The Drama lands in theaters on April 3
The director behind Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's new movie The Drama has come under scrutiny for a resurfaced essay in which he detailed a romantic relationship he had with a teenage girl as an adult.
In 2012, Kristoffer Borgli, the 40-year-old Norwegian filmmaker behind The Drama and the Nicolas Cage-led 2023 movie Dream Scenario, published an opinion essay in the magazine D2. On Wednesday, March 25 the story went viral after a Reddit user shared a scan of the print piece on the social media platform.
The Hollywood Reporter published an English translation of that essay on Thursday, March 26.In the piece, Borgli—who was 27 when it was published—noted that Wikipedia at that time listed "266 films that deal with so-called May-December romances."
"The reason I know this is because I met a girl ten years younger than me whom I liked very much – a girl who wasn't old enough to vote – and I had to find something that could recalibrate my moral compass," he wrote at that time, per THR's translation. "The few friends I confided in about my situation responded that it was not 'within bounds.' "
As THR noted, the legal age of consent in Norway is 16. Still, despite the legality of the relationship, the outlet wrote that relationships between adults and teenagers "remain socially contentious" in the Northern European nation.
A rep for A24, the movie's distributor, did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.
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Kristoffer Borgli on March 17, 2026Credit: Phillip Faraone/Getty
In the 2012 essay, Borgli described his relationship with a girl who was in high school when they met and cited Woody Allen's 1979 movie Manhattan as a movie that "completely changed my attitude" about age differences in relationships. "The relationship there is presented as entirely open and romantic," he wrote. "If a film made in 1979, in which Woody Allen's 42-year-old character has a public relationship with a 17-year-old girl, is portrayed exclusively in a positive way and causes no controversy in its own time, then why shouldn't my relationship – with a considerably smaller age difference – in 2012 be 'within bounds'? I chose to listen to Woody over my friends."
Borgli also wrote that he was impressed with the unnamed girl's cultural interests, describing them as advanced compared to his own as a teenager. He also shared that they would spend time together at bars "where they didn't check ID" and that he fled her parents' apartment one day when the girl's parents arrived home "unexpectedly early from vacation."
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Kristoffer Borgli on Nov. 6, 2023Credit: Frazer Harrison/Getty
As THR noted, the legal age of consent in Norway is 16. The outlet wrote that relationships between adults and teenagers "remain socially contentious" in the Northern European nation.
Borgli's essay resurfaced just one week before The Drama hits theaters on April 3. The movie features Zendaya, 29, and Pattinson, 39, as an engaged couple whose relationship is put to the test when Zendaya's character confesses a dark secret about herself just days before their wedding.
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Source: Entertainment
Published: March 27, 2026 at 11:45PM on Source: RON MAG
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