‘Scrambled’ reaches for the funny in fertility
Leah McKendrick writes, produces and acts in the rom-com with a few naked personal truths
In the new romantic comedy “Scrambled,” Nellie (Leah McKendrick) revisits the romantic mistakes from her past — The Prom King, The Bartender With an App Idea, the Burning Man, The Nice Guy, The Cult Leader — trying to figure out where she went wrong while all her friends were getting married and having babies.
But this autobiographical film, which lands in theaters today, subverts the rom-com formula: Nellie isn’t searching for Mr. Right as much as she is striving to right herself, all while she goes into debt to freeze her eggs for the sake of her future happiness.
The movie, which co-stars Andrew Santino, Ego Nwodim and Clancy Brown, devotes plenty of screen time to Nellie’s medical procedures, but McKendrick, in her directorial debut, plays the relationships for laughs.
“Humor is how we survive in this world, and dating in L.A. in your 30s is just a clown show,” she said recently by video.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
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How did you decide you needed to tell this story?
I am always thinking about what my next movie is. I had decided to freeze my eggs and spend 14 grand — and make a movie about it. That was how I justified the biggest purchase of my life in my head, and how I’d make sense of this really dark situation that makes me feel like a complete failure for not hitting these milestones that everybody around me has hit.
I started freezing my eggs. And I started writing some scenes and jotting notes because I wanted to capture all of these live feelings that were going through my head. It began positive and empowering. Somewhere around the middle, it flipped and grew darker and I grew lonely and existential and bloated, so the movie did, too. But when I finished there was empowerment on the other end.
But the overlords were calling and I had to get back into my studio writing assignments. I was writing and writing and about a year later, two of my films that were important to me, including one that was a big franchise, were killed by the studio.
I was devastated. I cried for a week and then I told my team, “I need you to buy me a month out of my life and my schedules and my deadlines. I’m going to write that film about freezing my eggs and I’m going to shoot it this summer with my friends. I can’t live my whole life waiting for permission.
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Did making the movie help you understand what you had experienced or change the way you look back on it?
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Definitely both. Sometimes you’re writing off the top of your head and not realizing what it reveals about you — your deepest insecurities come out when you’re hiding behind a character name. I learned some things about how I feel about my dad. Why was I so protective of the dad character? Maybe because it’s my real dad and it is coming from a vulnerable space. At the end, she returns to her brother and her dad, which are her last two scenes with men, which I didn’t realize until somebody else commented on it.
Q
You don’t flinch from showing the injections, mood swings and medical procedural stuff.
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I want people to see the reality of it. I don’t want this to be propaganda — “It’s nothing but rainbows and kittens and empowerment.” It’s not. Creating
life is empowering: It is Beyoncé-level, epic stuff. But being a woman has every color. You’re degraded at times and it’s reductive at times and people are demeaning. I wanted you to see the darkness of what she endured and how scary it is to do it alone. I really hope that the moment at the end lands, where she says, “It would just be nice if somebody would hold my hand.”
She is saying, “I’ve got this and I’m a grown-up and I’m figuring it out, but could somebody just be here and sit with me in the darkness?”
On the set, I felt supported and safe so I was almost to a fault brave. I was obnoxiously ready to jump into the fire in a way that I’ve had some regrets about after the fact. My producers were saying, “You are naked in so many scenes that you didn’t need to be.” My male producers were saying, “Can we just take the nudity out of this scene?” which may be a first in history.
But the reality of freezing my eggs was me and my sweats, no bra on, belly out, feeling like a troll under the bridge. Why would I sanitize it and glamorize it for a movie? I want people to feel that it is representative of their experience or that I didn’t lie to them if they choose to do it. And if Nellie can do it, so can they.
Q
Your movie is coming out the same day as “Fitting In,” another autobiographical film, this one about a teen with a rare reproductive system disorder. Can you talk about that?
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It’s everything to see ourselves represented accurately on screen — we feel less alone and we feel less shame because we realize that our experiences are more universal than we could have ever imagined. If we could comfort ourselves and not feel shame the world would be more empathetic and we would give ourselves so much more grace. I think all of us should tell our stories.