Kristen Bell gets physical in ‘The People We Hate at the Wedding’
For Kristen
Bell, opting to star in Amazon’s outrageous comedy of familial faultlines, “The People We
Hate at the Wedding,” was partly personal.
In “People” Bell’s Alice and her gay brother Paul (out actor Ben Platt, “Dear Evan Hansen”) have listened to the pleas of their widowed mother (Allison Janney) and are reluctantly attending the London wedding of their filthy rich half-sister Eloise (Cynthia AddaisRobinson) from their mother’s first marriage. Much mayhem ensues.
“Claire Scanlon, I think is one of the most capable directors out there. Also,” Bell, 42, noted, “our children went to preschool together. Our kids are friends. And I love supporting a female director, supporting my friends.
“So I was already really onto it and then I read the script and was like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad this was genuinely laugh out loud funny.’
“And it’s about one of my favorite things, which is the drama that can exist in interpersonal relationships. Movies are interesting to me. You know when the spaceship lands or when Superman trains the hours backwards, that’s all well and good.
“But the interpersonal relationships are the most interesting to me because it is really hard to be human. And expectations are something that everyone has. And,” she emphasized, “expectations are resentments under construction.
“This family starts out so dysfunctional! Each character has a very good reason why they are dysfunctional — and then we’ve got 90 minutes to fix them in a very like cutting with raunchy way.
“It ends up being very heartfelt. At the time I read it, which was the middle of the pandemic, I wanted to be a part of something that made people feel good — entertainment that was a human-focused relationship because I felt that that was the biggest theme in my life.”
What Bell didn’t expect when she flew to London was an immediate immersion not just metaphorically but physically.
“A lot of wild messy stuff happens in this movie,” she revealed. “One of the most physical things we did was a scene where I’m thrown from a floating hot tub into the Thames River. It was,” she said, obviously disgusted, during a Zoom interview, “very, very clean. We shot that on Day 1. The morning of Day 1, which felt a little intense.
“But after having spent all day in a half of a bikini (I will mention it was the top half), we’re high-fiving Claire because the rest is so simple. You’re just pushing each other in wedding cakes and peeing on each other’s shoes.
“Because nothing compared to what we went through that first today.”