Rina fans everywhere, rejoice.
If you haven’t recovered from that cliff-hanger season 3 of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series ends with — where Ricky (Joshua Bassett) and Gina (Sofia Wylie) finally admit their feelings and kiss for the first time — then you should probably take time to prepare for season 4.
Ahead of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Bassett and Wylie spoke to ABC Audio about what it was like to further develop the Rina relationship in the final season of the Disney+ series, which streams Wednesday, August 9.
To Bassett, the experience was “a dream come true to work with Sofia in such a way.”
“Ricky and Gina have a healthy relationship,” Bassett said. “Yes, they both have their issues, and they’re still teenagers in high school, and so there’s the natural sort of drama that comes with that, but in general I think their hearts are in the right place. And I think that that’s a really beautiful thing that each character deserves.”
Wylie added that the journey to romance was hard-earned for the couple.
“We’ve seen Ricky and Gina as kind-of friends, and then truly friends and then something more than friends, but a weird in-between,” Wylie said.
“And they’re enemies at one point,” Bassett adds, referring to season 2. Wylie notes the pair, “like, didn’t speak.”
Wylie says this just makes Rina’s dynamic more multilayered.
“It’s really interesting to see now, finally, a new layer — a much more intimate layer — of their relationship, and what that will mean for them as individuals,” Wylie said. “I think always when there’s new characters introduced that that does mess with dynamics, and we’ll see if they can work through that and what happens with the relationship towards the end.”
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