Lily James stars as Tinder and Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd in Swiped

Whether you know the name Whitney Wolfe Herd or not, you will surely be familiar with her work. The tech entrepreneur helped transform the online dating industry in the 2010s by co-creating not one but two wildly successful apps – Tinder and, later, Bumble.

Her story – which includes her rise to co-founder status at Tinder, her subsequent forced resignation from Tinder parent company Hatch Labs, the lawsuit between herself and her former Tinder bosses and her rocky journey to creating her own app, Bumble – is the subject of Hulu’s new film, Swiped, starring Lily James as Whitney.

Ahead of the film’s release, we caught up with the writer and director of Swiped, Rachel Lee Goldenberg, to discuss portraying toxic male behaviour in the workplace, her admiration for Whitney and making a movie about a period of somebody’s life that an NDA prevents them from speaking about...

Whitney riles against in the male-dominated tech industry

Congratulations on the film! Whitney’s story certainly feels like one of those stories that once you’ve heard, you can’t quite believe how you didn’t know it already. Was that what made you want to make this movie?

Yes. Well, initally, Jen, our producer who met her partner on Bumble, was the one who started researching Bumble and how it came to be, and thought it could be a movie. She brought it to me and I had the same experience.

I found Whitney’s story so inspirational and, frankly, cinematic. I loved how she took some of the hardest things in her life and forged them into this big success. It just had this inherent movie quality.

Her experience working in a male-dominated field also hit me pretty hard as a woman coming up in the film industry. I know many people feel this way to varying degrees wherever they work. There can be a bit of a toxic culture, and you have this desire to fit in, but then how much do you push back when something feels bad? Issues around culpability and complicity and how to change culture all felt resonated with me really deeply.

I think something that’s going to surprise people is that Whitney wasn’t a participant in the film, nor was she consulted or able to speak to any of you because of the NDA she signed after leaving Hatch Labs. How then did you go about piecing this story together, and how much of what we see is true?

Knowing there were legal issues and that we couldn’t speak to Whitney, it just felt like a huge responsibility to take this as seriously as possible, and make sure that I was doing the best I could to tell her story.

My writing partner, Bill Parker, and I did as deep a dive as we could research-wise. The court documents are all public, and we read every interview, not just about what’s covered in the film, but generally about Tinder on the rise and Bumble on the rise.

Whitney creates new app, Bumble, after being forced to resign from Hatch Labs

We also went back and found everyone’s old Facebook and Vine accounts and things like........

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