THE KITCHEN
Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss take over the mafia in The Kitchen, a gangster story that’s upending conventions in more ways than one. Total Film gets the inside story on the mob thriller that feels a long time coming…
Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss are married to the mob in a slick genre-subverter.
Who says women can’t play gangsters?” Director Andrea Berloff has been asking the same question for years, but she’s always known the answer. The mob genre is as old as Hollywood itself, and it’s just as much of a boys’ club. Wives, molls, strippers and mamas are all well and good, but if you want to be a real wiseguy, you better have the stugots to go with it. Until now, that is.
“We all know what a mafia story looks like, but seeing it from a woman’s perspective – not as a comedy or as a joke, but in a really grounded, gritty, intense, dramatic way – that was something entirely different,” says Berloff, speaking to Total Film in LA. “I just wanted to challenge every aspect of it. This was my chance to turn everything on its head.”
Back in February 2016, Berloff had just lost out on an Oscar for her screenplay for Straight Outta Compton, when an unknown British graphic novel landed on her desk. The story of three women who take over the Irish mafia in the mid ’70s after their husbands get sent to prison
– a Scorsese-nodding New York crime thriller about life on the streets of Berloff’s old neighbourhood in Hell’s Kitchen – the book spoke to everything that she wanted to keep saying after Compton. “I found a lot of the same social issues and I found a whole lot of new ones. I sort of fell in love with it, but I also immediately started pulling
out different storylines and side characters. Not because there was anything wrong with the graphic novel, but I sort of felt like if I was going to get my one crack at telling this fantastic, big, female-driven story, I was going to get in as many different ideas as possible.”
Fast-forward six months and Berloff’s edgy, urgent take on the script has impressed producers so much that she’s now directing as well as writing, making The Kitchen her feature debut. And what’s her first big move to convince everyone to take a gritty, female-led gangster film seriously? To hire comedians for the starring roles…
My manager’s assistant read the script for me and said, ‘Yeah, you’re probably not right for it,’” says Tiffany Haddish, echoing what most people probably thought of the idea of the star of Girls Trip being up for playing a hard-bitten mobster. “So I read it myself. Then I read the comic. Then I told my manager’s assistant to find me the director so I can show her just how right for it I really am!”
Re-writing the role of mob-wife Ruby O’Carroll for an African-American actress after working on Compton
(“I just didn’t want to write a movie about three white women after being part of that conversation”), Berloff was convinced as soon as she sat down with Haddish, giving her the opportunity to prove herself in her first dramatic role – and letting her wow everyone on set with a tough performance that’s streets away from stand-up.
“The truth is I hung around a lot of real gangsters!” laughs Haddish, not used to playing it straight in interviews about gnarly crime movies yet. “When I used to buy weed you had to go to the dealer’s house and there was always a gangster movie playing on the TV. I always just wanted to be Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface when she comes down the stairs!”
With Haddish cast, Berloff turned her attention to the film’s toughest, roughest character, Kathy Brennan, the woman who ends up running the whole New York Irish mob – and an oddly perfect fit for Melissa McCarthy. Now less of a leftfield choice after her Oscar-nominated turn in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Berloff actually cast her back in February 2018, long before everyone knew she was capable of hard-hitting drama as well as loud-mouthed comedy. “We all just had incredible confidence in her,” says Berloff, admitting to making another key casting choice within seconds of starting a conversation. “It’s hard to say this because she plays a really violent gangster… but in some ways I think Melissa plays the most authentic version of herself in The Kitchen. She’s just incredible.”
“I don’t know why there’s such a divided camp between comedy and drama now,” adds McCarthy, tired of defending her decision to start playing dramatic roles after hits such as Bridesmaids and Tammy. “When you look back on films in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, we didn’t have this idea where you have to pick a side. I’m just always drawn to characters who are backed into corners, however that plays out.”
Rounding out the three leads with Elisabeth Moss as gun-nut Claire Walsh, Berloff managed to cast
The Kitchen entirely with unexpected choices – three women more used to playing underdogs, handmaidens and soccer mums than the new godfathers of the East Coast. But for everyone involved, that was all part of the point.
“One of the things that appealed to me was, yes it’s about three women who take over the jobs of the men in their lives, but they’re all really complicated women,” says Moss. “They’re not perfect. They’re not superheroes. They’re real women. The idea was that these characters are just as complex and morally ambiguous as if there was a man playing them.”
“It’s always something that I skate around, getting to play characters like that,” adds McCarthy. “To be honest though, it always comes up in the comedies that I’ve done too – everyone always says, ‘She’s not that likeable,’ but I’m never trying to be likeable!
I like playing people that, on the outside you go, ‘I would never do that,’ but then if you were shoved into that position, nobody knows what they’d do.”
For Berloff though, the whole idea of flipping the genre on its head runs far deeper than just giving a real voice to the female characters that usually
get side-lined. For her, asking an audience to empathise with vicious, corrupt, violent women is a statement of equality that Hollywood has been overlooking for decades. “We’ve had 100 years of men playing characters with serious flaws, and yet audiences seem to love them,” says Berloff, mentioning everyone from Steve McQueen to Tony Soprano, all part of an odd tradition that finds audiences crying over Michael Corleone, laughing with Joe Pesci and cheering on some of the most awful thugs in history. “All I would ask is that women are given the same consideration.”
Spending six months researching the Irish mafia, pouring through old New York Times reports, uncovering the real working-class history of Hell’s Kitchen and filling up her iPod with all the hits of 1978, the one bit of prep that Berloff knew she wanted to avoid was any firearms training for the three leads. “It’s a violent film, sure, but I thought it was important to show how these women might be authentically violent. I wanted them to feel like real people – like, how awkward would I be if I had to pick up a gun? It would feel ridiculous in my hand and I wouldn’t be confident. They aren’t gangsters when the movie begins, they’re housewives. I never wanted them to look cool holding a gun and I never wanted the violence to look gory.”
Berloff started shooting in May 2018 – determined to make the film her own way. Refusing to re-watch any gangster classics (“I’ve been influenced by them my whole life, but I wanted this to be my voice”), and deciding to only nod to the stylised DNA of the graphic novel in a few key “comic-book shots”, she wanted The Kitchen to feel like an authentic, dirty slice of street-life – even if that meant doing a bit of crowd control. “That first day, on my first shot as director, we were on location at a small grocery store and there were just so many people outside on the street,” she laughs. “We had Tiffany and Melissa in that first scene, and the people outside were just screaming Tiffany’s name. It was fantastic, but it was a challenge throughout the whole thing.”
When Haddish wasn’t being heckled, it was Common’s turn – playing the FBI agent on the heels of the mob, he was also the second biggest celebrity target whenever the crew set up a camera on location. “Common has… a lot of fans!” laughs Berloff. “We shot all over New York and people would just decide to scream his name in the middle of a take. To be honest though, I think I was prepared for this whole thing to be really impossible and difficult, and that I was going to want to run away, but there really was not a day that wasn’t fun. It was just an incredible experience.”
After a century of gangster films asking us to side with the same wife-beating, ball-busting, gun-toting male mobsters, it seems odd that no one else has thought of making a serious girl-gangster movie before. So why haven’t they? “Once you think about it, it does seem so obvious,” admits Berloff. “The fact is, you’ve never seen this kind of movie starring women before, but all I really tried to create was a reason to go and see a movie. You’re going to have a great time in the theatre and then you’re also going to have something to talk about on the car ride home. Honestly though, I think it’s because, by and large, throughout the history of cinema only 50 per cent of the people in this world have been given the opportunity to tell stories. We’re now entering an era where the rest of us get that chance. And we’ve got some stuff to say.”
The kitchen opens 20 september.
‘These characters are just as complex and morally ambiguous as if there was a man playing them’ elisabeth Moss