Camila Mendes Recalls Swooning Over Rudy Mancuso & Meeting His Mom! (Exclusive)

Camila Mendes and Rudy Mancuso are dishing on “Música,” their new coming-of-age love story that follows a young man with synesthesia, a condition where the brain causes sensory overload. In this

story, the aspiring creator’s head is filled with music.

“Extra’s” Melvin Robert spoke with the real-life couple, who opened up about meeting while making the movie, with Camila sharing that she was “swooning” and even told her “Riverdale” co-stars!

She recalled meeting Rudy’s mom, who portrays his mother in the movie and who Rudy says was “over the moon” for Camila.

Camila shared, “It was really sweet. I got to know his mom while I was getting to know him. I met them both pretty much at the same time.”

When she met him over Zoom for the first time, Mendes already had a feeling about Rudy, saying, “I had a work crush. I even talked to my ‘Riverdale’ co-stars about it… I didn’t know what it would be like until I met him in person… I couldn’t put that theory to the test until we were in front of each other, and then it was obvious after that.”

Rudy added, “The connection was being formed in real time as we were shooting.”

While they tried to keep quiet about their off-set romance, they said the cast and crew “started to feel it” toward the end of filming.

Rudy laughed, "My sister said immediately, 'What the hell is going on?'" He joked, "I was like, 'Nothing, I'm the director. She's an actor and producer. We're professionals,' adding, "We were not professionals."

Rudy, who wrote the movie, composed the music, directed, and starred in it, also spoke about the story being based on his own life and the challenges of wearing all those hats.

While he admitted it was challenging to manage it all, he said, “There was no other way for me to bring this to life… No one knows it better than I do.”

Mancuso made sure to credit his cast, crew, and producers, saying, “There’s no film without that.”

Camila said she thought it was “almost necessary” for Rudy to wear all the hats, saying, “It’s such a personal story, you kind of have to tell it yourself… You can’t really give that responsibility to anybody else, ‘cause you have that responsibility to yourself to tell it the way that it happened or the way that you envision it.”

In the movie, Mendes played a Brazilian-American girl next door who she told us is, in some ways, the “opposite” of her. She said, “I definitely share a lot of similarities and there’s a lot of personal aspects of her that I infused into her character, but I definitely am a little bit more of a future-minded person.”