A comedy giant goes serious

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? Melissa McCarthy plays it straight in a true tall tale…

From defecating in a sink in Bridesmaids to terrorising White House correspondents as Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live, Melissa McCarthy has established herself as one of the top comedic actors in the world. So, the prospect of McCarthy flexing her dramatic chops as real-life writer Lee Israel, a failing biographer caught in a web of deceit and forgery, in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, may come as a surprise.

“She read the script. Not because anybody was offering it to her. She just read it on her own and decided it was something she wanted to do,” recounts director Marielle Heller (The Diary Of A Teenage Girl and the upcoming, untitled Mr. Rogers movie starring Tom Hanks). “Then I read it with her in mind and it made a lot of sense. Somehow, it all seemed very right.”

Adapted from Israel’s memoir, the film details the life of the biographer who made a career penning (unofficial) profiles of pop culture figures, including Katharine Hepburn and Estée Lauder, in the ’70s and ’80s. Out of work and desperate to pay her bills, Israel begins a life of crime – forging letters written by the same celebrities.

“She could really get into the heads of people,” says Heller. “It shows how talented Lee was to get away with this.” A loner with little more than cats

for company, Lee befriends Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), a Withnail-esque con artist with a chequered past. “All of us who live in New York know somebody like Jack Hock. You can’t quite understand how they’re surviving, but they are,” laughs Heller. Although Israel’s criminal escapades are the film’s focus; her relationship with Jack “was the heart of the script” for the filmmaker.

“We got to understand all of those emotional complexities that made her unable to fully connect and the pain of that, but also the sort of beauty of these two misfits, who neither one of them has anyone in their lives for various reasons, but it somehow works together.”

ETA | 1 FEBRUARY / CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? OPENS NEXT YEAR.