
If The Summer I Turned Pretty fans can count on anything, it’s that a Taylor Swift song is always right around the corner.
The series finale, which dropped on Sept. 17, was no different. Author-turned-showrunner Jenny Han delivered not one but two major moments with Swift as the backdrop: “Dress” played while Belly (Lola Tung) and Conrad (Christopher Briney) finally kissed in the Paris moonlight, followed by “Out of the Woods,” which played as Belly chased Conrad down in the train station to tell him she loved him.
Fresh off the exciting news that the Prime Video series will return in a feature film written and directed by Han, the author breaks down those two finale song choices.
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“I don’t remember when I decided on ‘Dress,’ but I love the song. It’s one of my favorite songs off the album, so I was really excited to use it,” Han tells PEOPLE of the Reputation track.
The song not only tracked Belly and Conrad as they couldn’t keep their hands off each other all the way to her apartment, but Han also included a pause to let Conrad tell Belly that he “dreams” of being with her. “It’s really sexy, it’s passionate, and I thought it would be great in that moment,” Han says.
“Out of the Woods” is a song Han has had on the back burner for quite some time.
“For ‘Out of the Woods’ I had that thought kind of early on, because I wanted the moment, for the audience, to mirror back what was happening for Belly,” she explains. “When you hear the beginning of where we sync the music, you’re not sure immediately what [song] it is. But then you’re going to hear that ‘I remember,’ and she’s having her own moment of remembering who she is.”
Who she is, of course, is “a person who really loves Conrad,” as Han says. “So I really wanted that kind of feeling of an ‘aha’ moment.”
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Though Han’s music choice was the perfect cherry on top for those two major Belly-Conrad scenes in the finale, the reality of filming them was different. As Tung tells PEOPLE, “It’s almost like dance choreography type stuff where it’s very planned out and you just have to hit all the beats and make sure the camera’s moving at the same time as you.”
“You’re really worried about blocking someone’s light,” Briney adds.
But still, he tells PEOPLE, “I find you do treat it like any other scene. I mean, I try not to lean too much into or think too much about pressure or how people receive it. I know there’s a lot of people that are Team Conrad and a lot of people that are Team Jeremiah, so in my mind, I’m like, ‘Some people are going to be happy and some people won’t anyway, so there’s not really any point in putting weight to what I think their version of the right ending is.’”
Swift’s music has been the backdrop of nearly every major moment in The Summer I Turned Pretty since its 2022 premiere, with songs like “The Way I Loved You” and “False God” marking major moments for Belly and Conrad.
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Han has said that she was willing to do “whatever it took” to include some of Swift’s work in season 1, to the extent that she wrote the singer “a handwritten note” to ask for permission and explain “how much it would mean — not just to me, but I thought, to the fans. That was the gift I really wanted to give, because I’m like, they’re gonna go crazy for this.”
“I felt like she is someone who bets on women. And I felt like she bet on me,” Han told Jenna Bush Hager on her podcast, Open Book, earlier this year. “And I can’t say enough how thankful I am that she let us use her music.”