Lockdown laughs
A group of Hollywood stars are forced to quarantine together in a JUDD APATOW comedy
The Bubble
Available: Friday1 April Genre: Comedy
COMEDY WRITER AND director Judd Apatow brings viewers his first Netflix project this week with a new pandemic-set movie, The Bubble.
Doctor Who’s Karen Gillan and The Mandalorian’s
Pedro Pascal play Carol Cobb and Dieter Bravo, the Hollywood stars of fictitious action-movie sequel Cliff Beasts 6, who reunite in England after five years to film the latest instalment of the franchise about flying dinosaurs.
They’re soon dealing with plenty of green-screen CGI as they re-create a dinosaur attack on Everest, but when the pandemic halts production, the cast and crew are forced to hole up in a hotel.
Among those forced to quarantine are divorced actors Dustin and Lauren (David Duchovny and Apatow’s real-life wife, Leslie Mann).
‘The actors are trying to make a big action franchise film and they all have different levels of happy to be coming back for the sixth time,’ says The X-files star Duchovny.
‘The movie is about the protocols you have to observe to make a movie, and then the added pressures of what it must be like for people who’ve been working together for so many years to then be quarantined together. You see all the petty hatreds and competition, plus the boredom and the freak-outs, that would happen in such a pressure cooker of quarantining.’
Appropriately, The Bubble was also filmed in England in accordance with COVID-19 restrictions.
WORKING IT OUT
‘Just to be able to work at all during the pandemic was kind of special,’ says Duchovny. ‘Things are starting to pick back up, but this past year hasn’t been that busy. So I was really happy to be working. And I met with Judd Apatow when he was a writer on The Larry Sanders Show and probably in his 20s, so to be back together is really nice.’
Peter Serafinowicz and Kate Mckinnon appear as studio executives, while Benedict Cumberbatch cameos as himself. And Apatow’s 19-year-old daughter Iris plays Krystal Kris, a rising star.
‘It’s definitely a complicated world right now and we need to reflect that,’ says Apatow. ‘But not all the time. Sometimes you want to provide an entertaining break from all the stress.’