THE SPIES NEXT DOOR
Director wanted stars to be believable (and funny) as amateur secret agents
MANY action films have featured badass women gunning down villains, but writer-director Susanna Fogel always found something missing.
“When it comes to a female lead, it feels like there’s just sort of a gender flip of male-driven movies,” she tells The Post. “There’s a crop of bionically confident, strong women, but you never really get to know their inner lives or their personalities. It’s progressive on one level, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.”
Fogel hopes to change that with her new action-comedy that she brands “‘ Bridesmaids’ meets Bond.”
“The Spy Who Dumped Me,” out Friday, stars Mila Kunis and “Saturday Night Live” breakout Kate McKinnon as a pair of unlikely butt-kickers. When Audrey (Kunis) suddenly discovers her ex-boyfriend (Justin Theroux) is a spy, she and her uninhibited BFF Morgan (McKinnon) are forced to embark on an international adventure to keep the world from crumbling.
Fogel says she intended from the start to avoid slapstick and other clichés of the action-comedy genre.
“We wanted to have real, legit action that could hold up in an action movie, combined with grounded comedy,” she says.
That meant hiring a stunt coordinator with serious cred. She found one in Gary Powell, who oversaw all of Daniel Craig’s 007 flicks so far. Powell says it was imperative that the action sequences be realistic for two char- acters with no spy experience.
“You don’t want to go too over the top with it, because then it becomes unbelievable,” he says, “and you don’t want to underdo it because, obviously, it’s not exciting enough.”
One marquee stunt involves a car chase where Audrey takes out a number of assailants who are pursuing her on motorcycles. The twist is that her successes are accidental — less a credit to skill than her own erratic driving.
“If you’re doing a James Bond film, you expect him in a car to do something that no one else has done before,” says Powell. “What I didn’t want was these two girls [to] turn into super-drivers.”
Other stunts involved more training, such as a climatic scene starring McKinnon, in which she physically fights a villain while on a trapeze, 50 feet in the air. Stunt doubles filled in for some of the more challenging moves, while McKinnon did as much as her few weeks of training allowed. Fogel recalls that the actress was initially afraid of heights, but by the time additional footage was shot for the scene a few months later, she was super into it.
“She was so dazzled by the stunt doubles’ muscles that she was . . . just completely awestruck by them,” says Fogel. “It felt like when you take a kid to gymnastics or something, just watching Kate go crazy.”
One stunt, seen in countless action flicks, didn’t make it into this one. Fogel’s original script featured a plunge down a zip line, but Powell said that was a no-go.
“Gary has a thing about zip lines. He hates zip lines,” Fogel says. “He [was] like, ‘You’re really going to make me do a zip line thing? I hate it! It’s not realistic. Why would this happen?
Who would have a zip line there?’ ”