Life of the Party
Melissa McCarthy plays a fortysomething mum who’s reborn to be wild when she goes back to college in LIFE OF THE PARTY. Total Film parties on set as the comedy queen reverses the age-old trend of guys sleeping with women half their age…
Up close and personal with improv-experts in Melissa McCarthy’s college-com.
September, 2016. It’s a clear, bright day and there’s nothing but smiles in The Optimist, a renowned restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia. Tonight, The Optimist will be open as usual, and Melissa McCarthy has already insisted that Total Film must feast on its octopus and shrimp. Right now, however, a ridiculously talented ensemble of comedic actors that includes McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Julie Bowen and Matt Walsh are gathered around a table, trading bantz. It’s the first of many, many takes, each one a good seven or eight minutes long and featuring fresh, succulent dialogue sprinkled with spicy gags.
Enter Luke Benward, a young, unfeasibly handsome actor who is playing a waiter. Only that’s not all he is. Viewers, and McCarthy’s Deanna – a fortysomething Midwestern housewife who returns to college when her husband of 25 years dumps her – already know him as Jack, a sensitive teen jock who Deanna hooks up with while partying like it’s 1989.
If that’s not awkward enough, Bowen, who’s just entered the restaurant, is both Jack’s mum and the woman that Deanna’s lousy ex-husband left her for. Deanna reacts, therefore, in the way that any sensible adult would – by diving under the table. Things escalate from there, with the improv-heavy, ricocheting cringe-chat always finding its circuitous way back to a killer line spat out by Deanna to Jack in front of his mum. No spoilers here, but it’s jaw-to-floor crude.
“Of all days, Luke’s mom is here!” winces McCarthy when she escapes to welcome Total Film. Yep, that’s right – in a case of life imitating art, that explosive line is being detonated not just in front of the character’s mother but the actor’s too. Still, it’s hardly the first crouch-into-a-foetal-ball moment that’s enlivened the already animated set of this riotous comedy.
“Luke and I were having an intimate moment in the library,” McCarthy recalls, half-grinning and halfgrimacing as she paints a vivid picture of Deanna getting it rampantly on with a guy young enough to be her son.
It’s not easy to make out with a stud when your director and co-writer, Ben Falcone, is also your real-life husband, and the father of your two children. Awkward? Then try this on for size: the hot-and-heavy scene was shot on McCarthy and Falcone’s 11-year anniversary.
“He was like, ‘Can you move your hands higher up her back, Luke?’ And I’d go, ‘Happy anniversary, honey!’” laughs McCarthy.
“It wasn’t a scripted kiss but it just felt right and we worked it into the scene, and were going back and forth – we couldn’t stop,” explains Benward, who says, without any hint or irony, that he was cast on the strength of his chemistry read with McCarthy. “I wished Ben a happy anniversary,” he chortles, then straightens his features and adopts a mock-serious tone. “But we’re professionals.”
As for Falcone, he offers a sheepish smirk. “That’s how you celebrate your anniversary, right – you watch your wife make out with a really handsome 22-year-old?” A shake of his head indicates he still can’t get the image out of his brain. “That was my gift.”
Keep it in the family
Falcone and McCarthy met in 1998 in The Groundlings, the sketch comedy troupe based in Los Angeles. They married in 2005, and Life Of The Party is the third feature they have written together, following on from Tammy and The Boss. Those, too, were directed by Falcone.
Life Of The Party was his idea. College is a world he knows well, his dad having been a campus professor in Illinois for 22 years, and the lightbulb illuminated during a visit from the in-laws.
“Melissa’s parents were staying with us,” he begins. “Her mom is the sweetest Midwestern woman you’d ever want to meet. So I was thinking, ‘What if Melissa was more like her mom and went back to school later in life? What if she was reserved her whole life and finally had a chance to cut loose?’
I wrote a boring version of it. Melissa came in and made it funny. And good.”
There is, of course, a pertinent point that acts as the axis of all of the crazed set-pieces that revolve around shy, selfless, put-upon Deanna transforming into party animal ‘Dee Rock’. In Hollywood movies, and in Hollywood itself, and the world at large, it’s not uncommon for an older guy to date a younger woman. So why, pray tell, should it cause such a stir when the shoe is on the other foot – or, put another way, the woman is on top?
Falcone, rather disappointingly, doesn’t want to get into the gender politics. “We just make the movie and let people say what they want,” he shrugs. But McCarthy and her long-time pal Rudolph, who was also part of The Groundlings scene in the late ’90s, are keen to go there.
“Deanna’s kind of reinventing herself, and I felt it was important that somebody who doesn’t know the original Deanna just sees her for who she is,” says McCarthy. “Jack doesn’t see a mom and wife, he sees this woman who he finds interesting, and they have things in common. Luke’s quite a bit younger than me, but for the love of God, the way he plays it? I buy that he’s smitten with me.”
Rudolph leaps at the theme when Total Film raises it during a coffee break. “I play Deanna’s best friend, Christine, and I’m the support that stays with her when her life gets upended,” she starts. “Christine carries into her new life with her. She doesn’t get a hot young boyfriend – she stays married to her boring old husband, and is happy about it – but she’s a spunky lady.”
And Christine, presumably, is all in favour of her bestie getting it on with a hard-bodied hunk? “Absolutely,” she cries, and quickly makes it clear that she, Rudolph, is in favour too.
‘Luke’s a bit younger than me but I buy that he’s smitten!’ Melissa McCarthy
“We should all be so lucky, y’know? If your husband of 25 years dumps you cold turkey, and you go back to college, you should definitely hook up with a college student. That should be a law.”
With everyone back in their positions, the bustle and buzz begins anew. Falcone has just passed a mischievous note that reads, simply: ‘Say, “Fuck you, Bill.”’ Bill (Steve Mallory) is one of the diners at the table, innocuous and affable. The ensuing hostility that is hurled in his direction is unexpected and hilarious.
Spontaneous combustion
Again, the takes are long and uninterrupted, and again, each one bounces off at surprise angles, a fearsome demonstration of verbal ping-pong. “I love that they hate Bill so much!” chuckles Falcone. “These are seven awesome comic actors. They are always going to say something funny.”
“We work psychotically hard on the script,” points out McCarthy. “We write and rewrite, work out every kink. But then you put in a Maya, you put in Steve Mallory, you put in Matt Walsh and Julie Bowen, and they take those words and change them or amp them up.
“They make it so much better. You’ve got to roll with that. If your story works, if the basic construct is there, then you can look to get some truly spontaneous moments on film. There’s an extra little spark when you say something for the first time and you see it land on someone, and they respond, and then you respond…” She hasn’t always been able to work this way – flagship dramedy series Gilmore Girls, in which she broke through as perfectionist chef Sookie before foul-mouthed Megan in Bridesmaids (with Rudolph, lest we forget) made her a bona fide star, insisted on its cast dotting every
I and crossing every T.
“If it was ‘it is’, you couldn’t change it to ‘it’s’,” she explains. “With this one… All these people are great improvisers. I know when one feels good. I know when my mouth works and it’s clean and precise.”
“Sketch comedians set each other up for the joke – they’re a different beast to stand-up comedians,” points out Rudolph. “And these are people I know and love and trust. We’ve worked together, written together, cried on each other’s couches when we had no money or somebody broke up with us. We have a shared language, and our only interest is making the best, funniest scene. There’s no vanity.”
Action is called. A few more increasingly savage assaults on Bill and then Bowen wanders over. The splenetic exchanges are bread-andbutter stuff for her character, who’s the antagonist of the piece. “I love getting to play someone nasty,” grins the actress best known as mum Claire Dunphy in America’s sharpest sitcom Modern Family. “When people talk to me and say, ‘How does it feel to be America’s mom?’ I’m like, ‘What?! How did that happen?!’”
So why does she think Falcone and McCarthy cast her against type? Simple: “When I was young, my mother told me I should be very careful with the tilt of my head, because my nose stuck up so high, people would think I was mean. I just genetically have resting bitch face.” Not that you’d believe it to watch her smiling at her co-workers as everyone reconvenes for yet more takes, honing and honing in a quest for perfection. Falcone’s latest note reads ‘Faster!’ and off they go, zapping zingers at breakneck speed.
Poor old Bill is really getting it from his sneering dinner companions, but look around at the crew and everyone is beaming, with some even bent double in laughter. Let’s hope that Life Of The Party has the same effect on cinema audiences, splitting sides even as it shatters moribund social conventions.
LIFE OF THE PARTY OPENS ON 11 MAY.