The tweet didn’t get noticed for 15 years. “Having fun at a fancy event with a woman who they say could be US President, Kamala Harris,” wrote the Bollywood star Mallika Sherawat. “Chicks rule!” Those words were written back in 2009, long before Harris, who was then the San Francisco district attorney, would ascend to Democratic presidential nominee. Now that the tweet has resurfaced, the actor tells Vanity Fair, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, Mallika is a clairvoyant. How did she know at the time?’ But we just tweeted that for fun.”

The “we” in question includes film producers Will Keenan and Govind Menon, who’d also been invited to an intimate Beverly Hills fundraiser for Harris, who was then running for California attorney general. They attended the event alongside Sherawat, who was the star of their next film. “I was feeling like a fish out of water. It was my first time in LA, and she really put me at ease,” says Sherawat of Harris. “I remember her saying that getting out of your comfort zone is good to build character, and it’ll make you a stronger person. Coming from India, female politicians are so rare. If they are there, they come from a very dynastic or royal family. Here I was meeting a lady who had built everything with her own two hands.”

Says Keenan, “Malika was, even that night, trying to study her.”

Although Harris’s candidacy has drawn comparisons to Veep’s Selina Meyer, it was actually an obscure 2011 indie titled Politics of Love that embraced her as inspiration for a fictional character. After working with Sherawat on the 2010 horror movie Hisss, which was directed by Jennifer Lynch (David’s daughter), Menon and Keenan secured funding for the performer’s first English-language film—a romantic comedy told through the lens of the 2008 election. Sherawat would star as a campaign volunteer for Barack Obama while her love interest, played by Brian White, would play an organizer for John McCain.

Menon hoped that the movie would fill a void. “There weren’t too many romantic comedies made with nonwhite people,” he says, citing Mira Nair’s 1991 drama Mississippi Masala, starring Sarita Choudhury and Denzel Washington, as one of the only major films to feature both Indian and Black leads. There also weren’t many that delved into the world of politics. “At that time, the Democrat-Republican divide wasn’t as toxic and as horrible as it is now,” says Menon. “I don’t think that we would’ve made that movie now.”

After watching Obama win the presidency together in a hotel room in India, Keenan and Menon were eager to invoke another rising political figure with their movie, and commissioned frequent Hallmark scribe Gary Goldstein to write the script. “I distinctly remember there was a conservative couple at the fundraiser,” says Menon. “I was very surprised, and they’re like, ‘Oh, she’s brilliant and we don’t always vote along party lines. We just want somebody very efficient.’ It was interesting to me that she’s a liberal person, from San Francisco, and yet able to connect to a wide range of people. So that’s where the idea germinated: ‘Hey, here’s a person who could be liberal and have a relationship with a conservative guy.’”

No one’s saying that Harris dated someone on the other side of the aisle before marrying entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff in 2014. “She was really more of a template,” Goldstein says. “When I would watch her in interviews, I thought she was such an incredibly inspirational and intelligent person. If there was anything taken from her as a person that was infused into the character in the movie, it was this kind of resilience, using your best instincts to make good trouble.”

So on an evening in June 2009, a Bollywood leading lady and a pair of producers found themselves contemplating the woman who would one day become a presidential nominee—her name in their film’s acknowledgments an amusing footnote in an otherwise historic career. “I was already in awe of her,” says Keenan. “It not only reinforced our decision to base the character on her, but it reinforced what I thought Kamala would do in this world.”

“By the way, how did you come across it?” Keenan asks, aware of just how difficult it is to watch Politics of Love, if you’re so inclined. The movie has largely disappeared from the internet—with only secondhand DVD copies from retailers like Amazon and eBay. “It has been pirated quite a bit,” Keenan offers, unprompted. “So if people really want to see it, they can find it online.”

Opting to go the legal route, I ordered a DVD version. (“Oh, I have so many,” Goldstein tells me. “I could have given you one.”) The cover art is striking, to say the least. Sherawat and White’s characters, Aretha and Kyle, are entangled in an American flag made to look like bed sheets. Interlocking elephant and donkey symbols sit alongside the film’s tagline: “Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows.” Oscar-nominated Ruby Dee is credited in one of her final roles. And some versions of the poster still have the original title: “I was hoping they had the guts to release it as Love, Barack—maybe Barack and Michelle would actually look at the movie sometime,” says the film’s director William Dear.

While he did not meet Harris, the movie’s screenwriter spoke to campaign workers. And Keenan met with McCain’s 2008 campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, who has since emerged as a vocal Never Trumper, in hopes that he would be a consultant on the movie. Says Keenan, “I didn’t know [at the time], but he couldn’t because he was consulting on the HBO thing where Woody Harrelson played him.” (That would be Game Change, which featured Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin and Ed Harris as John McCain.)

But for all of the film’s political bona fides, much of its messaging feels clunky, as in the ending dialogue in which Obama’s “Yes we can” is quoted shortly before the main characters kiss. The small Florida town where the lead couple campaigns is reduced to bikini-clad car washes and Palin-themed pie sales. And the reasons for both characters’ political beliefs go mostly unexplored. “If you had to suck face with a Republican, at least he’s a cutie patootie,” Aretha’s adoptive mother, played by Loretta Devine, quips upon learning of their relationship.

Then there is the multiracial identity of Aretha, whose father is played by Gerry Bednob. “I always thought I had to work twice as hard, be twice as good, and follow twice as many rules,” Aretha says of her “loyalty” to both cultural identities. But that childhood struggle is mainly expressed through “tug of war” dinners highlighting her mother’s fusion dishes, like catfish masala and samosas stuffed with black-eyed peas.

Some of this could have been mitigated if more filmmakers of color had been involved. Menon says a Black director was originally attached to direct the film but parted ways with the project three weeks before production. “We were in a panic because everything was set up, all the money had gone in,” he says. “So the choice was should we shut down the film and lose a quarter of our $2 million budget, or somehow find somebody who can step in and manage to film this?” A crew member who had worked with William Dear, director of Angels in the Outfield, suggested him as a replacement.

The shoot was difficult, Menon remembers. “This change in the director caused a lot of confusion, and there were some budget issues as we went along. That’s what I remember more,” he says with a laugh. Meaning, more than the movie itself.

The movie’s cast is diverse, and Goldstein, the screenwriter, says, “We certainly worked with the actors if there was anything that came up that they felt might’ve been expressed differently, but I don’t think there really was much that changed.” Later in our conversation, he adds, “I think like any movie, they have to be viewed through the period it was made to really understand what the creators were trying to do.”

If Dear had made the film now, he says, “I would’ve had to have been very careful not to cliché the extremeness of the [political] right. Both Gary and myself would’ve been more cautious about certain pieces of dialogue.” Still, “I don’t think there’s anything offensive in the movie.”

Some parts of the film do feel tone-deaf, though—including two scenes that inexplicably include Aretha and Kyle eating at a Native American–themed restaurant where their white server dons a headdress. “I don’t remember that,” Dear says when I mention this sequence. “Yes, I definitely would’ve been more sensitive to that. I’m going to go find the DVD and look at this again. I haven’t watched in a lot of years.”

Ultimately, of course, the movie drifted into obscurity. “The streaming platforms hadn’t really taken off, and it was really hard to get a theatrical release,” says Menon. “So, the financial performance of the film was disappointing.” Mainstream critics didn’t pay much attention, though a Los Angeles Times review ruled that the movie was “easy to take.”

Sherawat, the leading lady, remains a fan of the film. “I watch it yearly. I love it,” she says. “It has such a sweetness to it.” The actor, who admits she’s “not so well-versed with American politics,” has a more optimistic view regarding politically fraught romances as well. “Don’t you think love transcends all that?” she asks. “Political views aside, when people fall in love, they can always find common ground, right?”

The movie ends with Aretha and Kyle using their political differences to their advantage, cohosting a “left meets right talk show” called Taking Sides. But could a relationship like this be possible between two people working on the Trump and Harris campaigns? “I’m sure it has—except it’s on Grindr,” says Keenan. “I mean, you look at Mary Matlin and James Carville and then the Conways [George and Kellyanne, who announced their divorce in 2023]. So it exists. If a new famous couple doesn’t come out of these handful of years, I’d be surprised.”

If made today, Keenan says the film would also “flip the script” on recent comments made by Donald Trump to the National Association of Black Journalists in which he questioned Harris’s multiracial identity, and the main character would overcome a Trump-like figure who uses her background against her. “She doesn’t have a problem with her identity,” he says, “but here’s this con man fooling people into believing otherwise. The ending would be that she doesn’t lose either sense of herself, because she’s comfortable in her own skin, whereas Trump has to get a spray tan.”

Despite the darkness that has accompanied much of the Trump era, those involved with Politics of Love feel reenergized by Harris’s candidacy. “There’s a lot of buoyancy to Mallika’s character and her family in the movie,” says Goldstein. “That’s something we’re starting to see brought back with the Harris-Walz campaign—joy and enthusiasm and all those things that are supposed to drive citizens to choose their leaders, optimism as opposed to pessimism.”

Sherawat says that at the aforementioned fundraiser, Harris advised the filmmakers to “represent both sides, the Democrats and the Republicans” in the movie. “She kind of looked forward to watching it. She was very, very encouraging,” the actor continues, noting that Harris was sent a DVD of the film. “I’m sure she must’ve watched it. But, no, we didn’t hear anything.”

Above all, the woman who played a character inspired by Harris remembers how very “normal” the politician was—an important label for Democrats who are weaponizing Republicans’ “Big Weirdo” tendencies. “For want of a better term, she was like one of us,” says Sherawat, “a normal person who can have such inspiring goals and achieve them.”

“I remember asking her casually at the party, ‘Do you think, Kamala, you could be president one day?’” she says. “And she was so confident. She said, ‘Why not?’”