Aidy Bryant (left) Busy Philipps and Amy Schumer in “I Feel Pretty.”
After 15 years doing standup, a three-year run with her own Emmy Award-winning sketch series, “Inside Amy Schumer,” and what must feel like several careers’ worth of media dust-ups over jokes that have skidded right up to — and occasionally over — the line between edgy and ill-advised, Amy Schumer knows how to keep laughing through a good heckling.
“Can I just say what a flattering backlash it was?” Schumer said during a recent morning interview with Aidy Bryant of “Saturday Night Live” to talk about their new movie “I Feel Pretty,” opening Friday, April 20.
Schumer, 36, joked about her faux appreciation for the critical tweet storm she found herself in after posting the “I Feel Pretty” trailer in February.
“People were basically saying, ‘You’re not fat and ugly and disgusting enough to not feel good about yourself ’ — like the main character she plays — said Schumer, dressed for spring in head-to-toe lavender, her hair up in a neat bun.
“In all seriousness, that is really not what the movie is about. It’s not described as ‘a homely overweight woman finds confidence.’ It’s about someone who struggles with self-esteem, wants to look in the mirror and just feel OK, which we all do.”
Like a lot of Schumer’s best comedy routines, “I Feel Pretty” uses a coy, even fairly ridiculous, premise to usher in some powerful skewering of gender issues, specifically the ways women have internalized the message that one’s sense of self-worth is wholly dependent on one’s weight and beauty.
In “I Feel Pretty,” which Schumer also produced, she plays Renee Barrett, a woman plagued with insecurity about her looks until she sustains a gruesome (and hilarious) fall at a Manhattan SoulCycle. She wakes from her head injury believing she’s been transformed into the most beautiful — and thus the most confident, swaggering, no-guy-out-of-her-league — woman in the world.
Renee promptly picks up a new boyfriend (comedian Rory Scovel) at the dry cleaner, joins an outrageous dive-bar bikini contest and talks her way into a job at an Estee Lauder-like cosmetics empire (where her bosses are Michelle Williams and Lauren Hutton). Bryant and Busy Phillips play Renee’s BFFs, who can’t fathom how their friend — who looks exactly the same as before — is suddenly overflowing with excess confidence and has an inflated ego to match.
“Girls are taught at a young age that your value comes in your looks, so you start to believe it,” Schumer said. “I was very interested in doing something with this positive message that you might just be OK as you are. I wish I could have seen a movie like this when I was 14.”
Whereas the early criticism slammed the movie for implying that only something like brain damage could make a woman larger than a size 2 feel OK about herself, “that type of thinking is really a sign of this prison we all live in,” Bryant said. “It’s disappointing. I mean, no one thinks more about body image in Hollywood than I do.”
Bryant, 30, who grew up in Phoenix and joined “SNL” in 2012, is open about “having felt for my whole life that anyone who looks like me just doesn’t exist onscreen — or if they do, there’s a tuba underneath them and they’re a full-on hateful punch line. It was truly a radical idea when I finally thought, let’s just see what happens if I actually like myself and think I’m attractive as is.”
What happened is that Bryant’s career took off in a major way. She believes it’s no coincidence that as soon as she freed up mental space from body obsession, “almost immediately I was hired by Second City, and two years later by ‘SNL.’ ”
Bryant has become one of the show’s most prominent female stars this season with her recurring characters such as Melanie, the horny tween slumber-party guest, and her Demi Lovato-singing impression of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Schumer (who just got married to chef Chris Fischer) and Bryant (who’s engaged to her longtime boyfriend, comedy writer Conner O’Malley) first met when Schumer hosted “SNL” in 2015, a few months after her blockbuster “Trainwreck” opened.
“We’re both good friends with (former cast member) Vanessa Bayer, and we always knew the two of us would become good friends. We just didn’t know it would be this fast and furious.”
They both agreed feminism can make great fodder for comedy, but they also each expressed frustration with the degree of public fascination with their physical appearance — in other words, exactly why we need a comedy like “I Feel Pretty.”
“I’ve made so many jokes about myself,” said Schumer, who called herself a “blond Shrek” (and worse) in her best-selling memoir “The Girl With the Lower-Back Tattoo.” “You couldn’t find me on a late-night talk show where I wasn’t saying something self-
deprecating about my appearance.”
“When I was a kid dreaming of being on ‘SNL,’ I dreamt of just doing funny characters,” said Bryant, “but when you get there, the things we’re living through are on your mind and you can’t help wanting to put them on the show. So suddenly you’re playing (the White House press secretary) or facing the challenge, ‘How can I make sexual assault a funny scene with a point of view?’ It’s a really tough task.
“Sometimes it feels unfair. Wouldn’t I love to be up there just playing a chicken?”
“Uh, you did that!” Schumer said. “And still got to kiss Ryan Gosling.”
Jessica Zack is a freelance writer who frequently covers film, art and books for The San Francisco Chronicle. Twitter: @jwzack