‘It’s radical to release a film called Girls Like Girls in this climate’: hitmaker turned director Hayley Kiyoko on sexuality, safety and becoming ‘Lesbian Jesus’

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”.

Pool cute … Maya da Costa and Myra Molloy in Girls Like Girls. Photograph: Dan Power/Focus Features

“Once I released Girls Like Girls, not only the song but the music video, and saw that so many people in the world felt the way I felt, and that I could still be loved for who I was, that was a big indicator of allowing myself to feel that type of love,” she says. 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). “I never believed that my stories really mattered, because I never got to see them.”

Born Hayley Kiyoko Alcroft, the singer grew up close to the limelight. 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.

Like the clappers … Hayley Kiyoko on the set of Girls Like Girls. Photograph: Dan Power/Focus Features

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.

Kiyoko describes the current political climate as “heartbreaking”, and though she is keen to make clear that she is “not the spokesperson for what’s going on in the world”, she says: “It’s not safe for our community, and we are continually fighting for pride events and pride festivals to continue to be funded.” Reflecting on the video for her 2016 song One Bad Night, in which she highlighted the violence transgender women experience, she says she would go about making it differently, were she to make it now.

Daddy daze … Zach Braff as Coley’s father in Girls Like Girls. Photograph: Focus Features

She stands by it being “really important” to spotlight trans people’s stories, but now thinks it’s more important, rather than focusing on the violence queer people experience, to “create art that is more queer joy and showing us in spaces where we are thriving … How radical is it that right now in this awful political climate, we get to release a movie called Girls Like Girls in cinemas and to remind the world that our stories and our love matters and that we will never go anywhere?”

The queer couple at the heart of the Girls Like Girls film do face adversity, with Sonya describing her relationship with Coley as “wrong” at one point, but for the most part it’s an intentionally positive portrayal of self-discovery. In particular, Coley is unequivocally accepted by her father, without fanfare. Kiyoko, who has spoken previously about how her parents initially dismissed her sexuality as “a phase”, says “everyone has their own journey with their family dynamics”, but says it felt important to show an accepting father figure in the film. “We go to watch movies to dream and to fantasise and to see representation that maybe we lack in our lives.”

Kiyoko says “it’s been really healing” to promote Girls Like Girls right after getting engaged earlier this summer, “celebrating this traumatic moment of my teens” while also being able to show her fans that she now has “a partner who makes me feel so seen and loved”. The singer’s fiancee, Becca Tilley, is a former contestant on the dating show The Bachelor. The pair met in 2018 when the reality TV star was trying to set Kiyoko up with her younger sister, but Tilley’s sister “bailed, and she ended up going instead”, Kiyoko says. “We’ve been together ever since.” Wedding plans are on hold as “I’ve been in Girls Like Girls universe”, she says, but she hopes that soon “we’ll be able to get into that”.

Certainly, Kiyoko’s career seems to be in full flow right now: next month she will be headlining the 35th iteration of the famed lesbian music festival The Dinah, which she is “very excited” about, particularly at a time when lesbian spaces are not “very accessible or available to people”. After that, she hopes to continue developing herself as a film-maker, and wants to take on more film and TV directing jobs. Music “will always support my storytelling”, she says, but she has “no idea” if she will continue to release new albums and go on tour.

While Kiyoko rides the high of her first feature film finding global audiences, where is her own personal Sonya, the girl who broke her teenage heart, now? She doesn’t know, “but I’m grateful for the trauma because it led to my directorial debut”, she says with a grin. “I really do feel like I finally found my home, which is directing,” she says. “And I hope to continue to do that for ever.”

Girls Like Girls is in cinemas 2 October.