Numa Perrier’s romantic comedy, adapted from Tia Williams’s novel, follows a 40-year-old fashion editor who restarts her career at her former rival’s start-up and falls for a much younger videographer who turns out to be the boss’s son.

The Perfect Find starts with a woman who has to begin again at 40. Jenna Jones (Gabrielle Union) was a star fashion editor in New York until her long relationship with Brian (D. B. Woodside) ended abruptly and the fallout cost her the job at the city’s most prestigious magazine. After a stretch back in her childhood bedroom, she returns to Manhattan a year later with one way back into the business: a trial as creative director at Darzine, the digital start-up run by Darcy (Gina Torres), her former rival, who is not inclined to make anything easy for her.

A secret kept inside the office

The complication arrives early. After a night out with her friends, Jenna meets a younger man, the two hit it off and they kiss. The next morning, at work, she is introduced to Darzine’s new videographer. He is Eric (Keith Powers), the man from the night before, a filmmaker in his twenties with ambitions of his own, and he is also Darcy’s son. Jenna and Eric are assigned to work together on the rebranding campaign that is supposed to relaunch the magazine’s subscriptions, and they agree to keep their night a secret.

From there the screenplay sets two clocks running at once. One is professional: Jenna has a few months to prove to Darcy that she still has the eye that made her name, and the campaign is her chance. The other is personal: the closer she gets to Eric, the more she has to hide from the woman who signs her contract, and the more she has to ask herself whether a relationship with a man roughly half a generation younger can survive outside the office. On paper the premise gives both the same weight, which sets it apart from the usual office romance, where the job tends to be scenery.

A novel written at a low point

The story comes from Tia Williams, who published The Perfect Find as a novel in 2016. Williams had spent years as a beauty editor at magazines such as Essence, Glamour and Elle when the industry moved online and much of her generation of print editors was pushed aside. At the same time she was going through a divorce, raising a toddler alone and selling her apartment. She has said she invented Jenna Jones as a double who managed to get her life together, in the hope that writing her would help her do the same. The romance also had a root in her own life: she once dated a much younger man, although the gap in her case, 12 or 13 years, was smaller than the one she gave her heroine.

The book’s road to the screen was unusual. Williams has said it was turned down by every major publisher in New York, with feedback that questioned whether a Black woman could be a fashion editor or asked her to make the novel about Jenna’s struggles in a white industry. She refused to change it and released it through a very small independent publisher, which meant it was sold almost only on Amazon. It still won the bronze Independent Publisher Award for multicultural fiction and the African American Literary Award for best fiction. Then someone sent Williams a Snapchat of Gabrielle Union reading the book on holiday; Union contacted her, told her it was a movie, and secured the rights. Williams went on to write Seven Days in June (2021), a New York Times bestseller, and A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (2024), and since 2020 she has been editorial director at the Estée Lauder Companies.

Gabrielle Union as producer and lead

The project was announced in November 2018, with Gabrielle Union attached as star and producer through her company, I’ll Have Another. Tommy Oliver and Codie Elaine Oliver produced for Confluential Films, and Stuart Ford’s AGC Studios came on board as well. The role sits close to the core of her career. Union broke through in Bring It On (2000) after supporting parts in She’s All That and 10 Things I Hate About You, and she built much of her standing on romantic comedies such as The Brothers (2001), Deliver Us from Eva (2003) and Think Like a Man (2012). Between 2013 and 2019 she led the BET drama Being Mary Jane, another story about a successful woman in media sorting out her love life, and she has written two memoirs, We’re Going to Need More Wine (2017) and You Got Anything Stronger? (2021).

Numa Perrier’s first studio film

In June 2020 Netflix picked up the film and named Numa Perrier as director. The Haitian-American filmmaker co-founded Black&Sexy TV, a collective and streaming service for Black millennial audiences, and made her feature debut with Jezebel, a semi-autobiographical drama about a young woman working as a webcam performer in Las Vegas that premiered at SXSW in 2019 and later reached Netflix. The Perfect Find was her first studio film and her second feature. Between projects she had directed television episodes for Queen Sugar, The Wonder Years and Young Rock, and in 2023 she also directed episodes of the Hulu comedy Unprisoned.

The screenplay is by Leigh Davenport, the Chicago-born writer who created Run the World, the Starz series about a group of Black women in their thirties living and working in Harlem, and who wrote Wendy Williams: The Movie (2021). Like Williams, Davenport came from media: she was editorial director of the website HelloBeautiful.com when she decided to turn to screenwriting in 2017. A comedy about the fashion-media business, written and adapted by two women who had worked inside it, is a big part of what the project promised. Williams herself has said the film’s story differs from the novel, as adaptations usually do, but that its themes and its love story remain intact.

The cast around Union and Powers

Keith Powers was cast as Eric in December 2020. The actor, born in 1992, played Tyree in Straight Outta Compton (2015) and Ronnie DeVoe in the BET miniseries The New Edition Story (2017), and he later co-starred in the Netflix science-fiction film Uglies (2024). Off screen, he and Union were born nearly 20 years apart. The role of Darcy first went to Niecy Nash in March 2021, but scheduling conflicts forced her out, and that June Gina Torres took over. Torres, born in the Bronx to Cuban parents, is best known as Zoë Washburne in Firefly and as Jessica Pearson in Suits and its spin-off Pearson, a screen history that made her an obvious choice, on paper, for a character who is both Jenna’s boss and her lover’s mother.

Around them, Aisha Hinds plays Billie, La La Anthony plays Elodie and Janet Hubert plays Monica, three roles announced in June 2021, while D. B. Woodside plays Brian, Jenna’s ex. Shayna McHayle, Sterling ‘Steelo’ Brim, Lina Green, Winnie Harlow and the comedian Godfrey fill out the circle of friends, colleagues and rivals. Several of the people behind the camera appear on screen too: Numa Perrier plays Pearl, Leigh Davenport plays Aretha, and Tia Williams has two cameos, one in a fashion montage and one in the final scene, in a sequinned dress and a big wig.

Filming in New York and New Jersey

Filming was first planned for 2019 but slipped, and the shoot finally took place in the summer of 2021, starting in Hudson County, New Jersey, in June and moving into Manhattan in the week of 19 July, with further locations in Newark and Jersey City before it wrapped in August. Eric Lin was the cinematographer, Paul Millspaugh edited the film and Amanda Jones composed the score. Clothes carry much of the story’s weight in a film about fashion editors, and the costume designer Amit Gajwani dressed both Jenna and Darcy, two rivals whose contest plays out partly through what they wear. The finished film runs 99 minutes.

From Tribeca to Netflix

The Perfect Find had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival on 14 June 2023, where it won the Audience Award for narrative feature, and Netflix released it worldwide on 23 June 2023. Weekly figures from the research firm PlumResearch put it at around 3.8 million unique viewers in the week of 26 June to 2 July. The following March, at the 55th NAACP Image Awards, Keith Powers won Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special, while Gabrielle Union and Numa Perrier were nominated for acting and directing.

The Perfect Find does not hide its models. A fashion office and a demanding boss belong to the line of The Devil Wears Prada, and the older woman with a younger lover is a familiar engine of romantic comedy. What the film adds on paper is a specific set of circumstances: a Black fashion editor written by a woman who lived that career, a lead actress who fought to bring the book to the screen and a director coming from independent cinema. Whether the age gap is treated as a real question or only as a plot obstacle is for each viewer to judge. For anyone who has followed Gabrielle Union’s romantic comedies since the early 2000s, it is a return to the genre with her name on the producing credits as well.