The “greatest stripper saga ever tweeted” comes to life in the new trailer for Zola, a big-screen adaptation of Aziah “Zola” Wells’ viral #TheStory.
Taylor Paige portrays the titular Zola and Riley Keough plays her new friend Jessica in the film about two Detroit strippers who travel to Tampa for what begins as a money-making opportunity before going very wrong.
The new trailer for Zola, co-written and directed by Janicza Bravo, touches on the insanity of a 48-hour odyssey that involves sex trafficking and a pimp (Colman Domingo), Tampa criminals, and Jessica’s “idiot boyfriend,” played by Succession’s Nicholas Braun.
“This is messy. You’re messy. Your brain is broke,” Zola tells Jessica amid the chaos. A24 will release Zola to theaters this summer.
In 2015, Wells gave her first-person account of the sage in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I made people who probably wouldn’t want to hear a sex trafficking story want to be a part of it,” Wells said at the time, “because it was entertaining.”
“Aziah, like many a writer, she’s able to step into a certain kind of personality,” Bravo told Rolling Stone last year. “Zola is the Twitter story, but Aziah, who is the woman you’re talking to, is smaller and softer. She says please and thank you. I was really taken aback. You don’t feel that in the Twitter [thread], and you didn’t feel that in the old script. I wanted to make sure that Taylour Paige, who was playing that part, would have a parallel experience. When Zola is dancing, she is one thing, and when she is home, she is another.”