Social Media Gobsmacked To Learn 'Potion Seller' Guy Is The Current Lynchpin Of Indie Cinema

Yesterday, a trailer dropped for a movie called Challengers. The film, directed by Luca Guagdino of Call Me By Your Name fame, stars Zendaya as a star tennis player in a love triangle between two male tennis players and friends.

Normally, this wouldn't be something Know Your Meme would cover, but there's a moment in the trailer that has taken meme-literate internet users for a ride — the reveal of the name of the film's writer, Justin Kuritzkes, who you may remember as the Potion Seller guy.

Yes, the man who once rocked the internet with a skit making liberal use of his camera's Photo Booth function and the premise that a knight is going to a battle and wants potions from a trollish potion seller is now the screenwriter for an indie movie project with some of the industry's biggest names attached.

This may not be too surprising to anyone who's been following Kuritzkes' post-"Potion Seller" years. He is a published novelist and playwright — when we spoke with him in 2021, he explained that the Potion Seller video was taken as he was completing his senior thesis as a theater major. Since the video was taken, he's had a rather successful career, and a trip to his Wikipedia page reveals he's married to fellow New York City playwright Celine Song.

That factoid rang a second set of bells for indie cinema fans, because Song's debut feature, Past Lives, is currently a darling of the indie movie circuit. The film tells the tale of Na Young, a Korean woman who immigrated to Toronto when she was around 12 and later to New York, reconnecting with her childhood friend and first love Hae Sung 24 years since they last saw each other. Na Young, who now goes by Nora, is married to an American writer named Arthur (John Magaro), setting up a tense meeting between the three at a bar in New York City's East Village.

That scene was inspired by an event from Song's real life when she met a Korean childhood friend at a bar while sitting next to her husband, who again, is Potion Seller creator Justin Kuritzkes. In essence, this means that one of the main characters in a love triangle of one of the most talked-about movies of the spring is based on Kuritzkes.

The wild confluence of circumstances has reintroduced much of the world to the career of Justin Kuritzkes, where many were thrilled that he had built a strong life for himself after the success of the "Potion Seller" meme.

Of course, there is now a real chance that he and his wife may end up competing against each other for "Best Original Screenplay" at this year's Oscars.

When asked if Kuritzkes has any plans for a potential Potion Seller movie or play, he told us:

I don't have any plans for a “Potion Seller” movie or a play. Weirdly, I've thought about it though. Every once in a while I'll be like, "Oh, should I do something with that?" And ultimately, the fun of it is that it's contained, especially for the people who are into it because it reminds them of weird encounters they have in RPGs. Part of the fun for me as a kid about those worlds was that you would just walk into a tavern in some town that clearly the B-team game developers developed. Like the main game director had bigger things to focus on and they assigned this to the young guys. "Oh s---, we forgot to do that village. Can you guys do it in a day?" And talking to NPCs who have so little going on. It's best for “Potion Seller” that it stays like that.