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Writer and actor Alex Lykos was worried.
A decade ago, he wrote a comic play called Alex and Eve about a romance between a Greek-Australian man and a Lebanese-Muslim woman.
It was successful enough outside the mainstream theatre scene to spawn three sequels - about their wedding, their baby then a version that compressed the trilogy into a single play. 
Lykos estimates the Alex and Eve shows have been seen by more than 25,000 people in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, including many members of the Greek-Australian and Lebanese-Australian communities.
But a while back, Lykos felt the cultural clashes that came from being Muslim in Australia felt dated.
"I was starting to sense that the use-by date for this story had come," he says. "That's it's not really relevant any more.
"But with the emergence of ISIS - and what happened with the Lindt Cafe seige - it's brought to the forefront even more the cultural and religious tensions that exist."
With a film adaptation of Alex and Eve opening in cinemas this week, Lykos is hoping the country is ready to laugh about the cultural differences between Australians from multicultural backgrounds.
It's an idea explored on screen over the years in the likes of They're A Weird Mob, The Wog Boy, Fat Pizza, Lucky Miles and, more recently, UnIndian.
Alex and Eve is directed by Peter Andrikidis, best known for such television dramas as Catching Milat, Bikie Wars: Brothers in Arms and East West 101 as well as the film Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 - another cross-cultural comedy.
Richard Brancatisano plays Alex, a high school maths teacher who still lives with his overbearing Greek parents in Sydney. They want him to do what his brother Stavros has done - find a good Greek wife and produce some grandchildren.
But Alex's life takes a different direction when he meets Eve, a Muslim lawyer played by Andrea Demetriades.
Just as it was for Adam and Eve, their romance is troubled.
His parents (Tony Nikolakopoulos and Zoe Carides) are vocal about their distrust of Muslims. And her parents (Helen Chebatte and Simon Elrahi) are lining up an arranged marriage to a Muslim man in Lebanon.
Lykos knows these cross-cultural clashes are a touchy subject for a comedy.
"When I first wrote it, I had warnings from extended family saying 'you've got to be careful because the Muslims are going to get upset and they could do something'," he says.
"But we staged it [from 2006 to 2013] and we've never had a complaint from a Lebanese Muslim person. We've had two complaints and they were both from Greeks."
Both those objections were about the way Alex's overbearing Greek father was portrayed.
Lykos says one of the most satisfying things about Alex and Eve has been the social cohesion in the theatre audience.
"You've got rows and rows of Greeks and Muslims sitting side by side. We're talking about tattoo clad guys with their wives just cacking themselves laughing and high fiving and carrying on."
As a Greek-Australian, he made sure there were an equal number of jokes about both sides of the romance.
"When you say 'Islam' or 'Muslim', there's already an implied drama there. People react.
"Playing drama on what already is dramatic, I thought would have been very uninteresting. So I thought I'd go opposite and have fun with it. I think that's what's really helped to make it work."
But the success of the play was far from certain early on.
Lykos, a former tennis professional who turned to the theatre in his late 20s, says the second stage performance in 2006 had to be scrapped for lack of interest.
There were 10 actors on stage, with Lykos playing Alex, but they sold just four or five tickets.
"We cancelled the show," he says. "I thought 'what have we done?'"
But over the next fortnight, word of mouth built audiences to the point where Alex and Eve became a hit and was able to expand to bigger theatres.
Lykos played Alex through each of the stage versions with various actresses as Eve, including Amber Gokken, Catherine Jermanus, Zoe Ventoura and Nisrine Amine.
He would have liked to return to the role in the film but instead plays Stavros, Alex's brother.
"I definitely wanted to play the role in the film but I've gotten a bit older," he says. "I'm 40 so it was more of a pipedream than anything else."
While Lykos hopes the film will entertain audiences, he is not sure it will change perceptions of Muslim Australians.
"Christianity and Islam have been fighting for centuries," he says. "I don't think a little movie is going to have any impact. But, if it does, great."
Alex and Eve is out now.