FUNNY business
Melissa McCarthy goes back to her improv roots.
The Boss St arring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Bell, Peter Dinklage, Kathy Bates Director Ben Falcone ETA 10 June
“We spent months writing and rewriting the lines… We squeezed each joke within an inch of its life to make it perfect… And then Melissa gets on set and starts doing something completely different.” Ben Falcone has every reason to sound frustrated – it’s hard enough directing an improv-prone Melissa McCarthy in a role she’s been developing for years, but that job’s even harder when you’re married to her.
Back working with his wife after 2014’s road-trip comedy Tammy, Falcone is bringing McCarthy’s old sketch troupe character out of retirement for The Boss – the film that casts her as a toppled business mogul trying to claw her way back to the top via the Girl Scouts’ door-to-door cookie racket.
“This is a character Melissa developed at The Groundlings, which is the improv theatre where we met in Los Angeles,” says Falcone. “After
Tammy we were thinking about what to do next and we both kept coming back to this crazy tycoon, Michelle Darnell.”
Looking like a frightening mix of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (“That was not our intention…”), Darnell is riding high on her billion-dollar empire when she gets sent down for insider trading. Getting out of prison with a reputation to rebuild, she moves in with her ex-PA (Kristen Bell) and sets her sights on the Brownies – resulting in a kid-on-kid streetbrawl, an epic swordfight with Peter Dinklage and one colossal set-piece that sees McCarthy hoisted above a stadium on a giant flaming bird.
“Most of your job as a director is just answering questions all day,” laughs Falcone, mulling over the big differences between his debut film and The Boss. “You turn up and someone comes up and asks what kind of forks you want in the cutlery drawer. But on Tammy I was mostly just shooting a couple of people in a car. I never had to deal with anybody flying around on a golden flaming phoenix...”
With McCarthy getting the chance to distance herself from her old stereotypes and flout her nasty streak (punching children, making children cry, spiking children’s drinks, puppeteering Kristen Bell’s breasts…), it’s easy to see why she’s been desperate to bring The
Boss to the screen for such a long time. “Even when she’s at the height of her arrogance and cockiness and brashness, Darnell is someone you still want to sit down and have a drink with,” laughs Falcone, who still relished the opportunity to cameo as an accountant who gets to call his wife “a stupid ginger” – albeit before getting hit in the throat with a tennis ball.
“The one thing that keeps our marriage going so strong is the fact that she gets to hit me with things,” he sighs. “Every movie we’ve been in together, she hits me in the face. And she hits hard.”