| By Fred Topel
In Theaters July 15
|
It’s a big summer for Lisa Kudrow. Her new series The Comeback is a hit on HBO, and she stars in the ensemble indie film Happy Endings. If you don’t know as much about the film as the new show, that’s okay. The intertwining story about gays, parents, incest, abortion, adoption and other light fare is hardly on billboards across the country.
From writer/director Don Roos, who previously cast Kudrow in The Opposite of Sex, the dark comedy features the actress as Mamie. Mamie got pregnant with her stepbrother as a teenager and told him she had an abortion. But she didn’t, and when a sleazy documentary filmmaker blackmails her with information on her son’s adoptive family, she gets her masseuse and lover involved, and then things get messy.
Between her stepbrother, her masseuse and her ultimate encounter with Tom Arnold’s character, Mamie gets a lot of action in Happy Endings. “I think I made out with everyone in the movie, except Maggie [Gyllenhaal],” she said. “And Laura [Dern]. All right, not everybody.”
Ultimately, Mamie teaches the filmmaker how to use his own digital editing system, though Kudrow herself is computer illiterate. “In fact, they usually break the minute I touch them.” Her performance as an editing maven was pure acting. “Honestly, it was just you touch this and that happens. Thank you.”
Kudrow refused to get too serious about the film, even refusing to answer the film’s biggest question: does it matter who someone’s biological father is? “That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s up for discussion for all time I think. There’s that nature/nurture issue.”
Even Mamie’s major confrontation with the filmmaker and her masseuse/lover was only complicated because the scene involved a gun. “There was more rehearsal for that than anything else because there was a firearm involved. That’s mostly just choreographing that.”
Roos wrote the part for Kudrow, and she had to contain her excitement during the development process. “Don and [his partner] Dan and I would hang out, and my husband every Friday night, come to a Friends taping and we’d hang out in my dressing room,” she said. “So I knew what Don was doing. He was working on a script and I would get like [antsy]. ‘Yes, there’s a part for you.’ And I didn’t care if it was just a featured extra or a part. Then when he was done to his point of satisfaction, he let me read it. And then it fell apart four times before it got made. So it wasn’t like, ‘I have something for you…’ because there was also in my mind, I know the way studios are even for independent films. They still need a certain caliber of cast in order to get the film made and I can’t guarantee money back for a studio. So I knew that just because Don wanted me to play it didn’t mean that I’d get to.”
Working together again provided no new developments. “It was the same. That was the happy surprise, that now that we’re so much closer than we were when we were shooting Opposite of Sex, we had just met, that it was the exact same fun dynamic and the friendship didn’t interfere in any way.”
Now that she has written episodes of The Comeback, she has stole some tricks from Roos. “Don has this system when he’s writing. It’s an hour a day, or just hour blocks of time. No matter what, you’re writing. If you want to break off and journal or go back to it, so I tried that.”
That worked for her TV episodes, but she would not compare herself to Roos just yet. “I don't know that Don has anything other than that. I don't know that he has some technique for characters or you know what I mean. He’s inspired. He’s got a gift and he’s inspired.”
Friends residuals must be astronomical, and that’s on top of the million an episode she already banked. Kudrow never has to work again, yet she keeps trying new things “because I love what I do. And I wanted to try writing, so that was also the opportunity with The Comeback and to write with Michael Patrick King.”
The multi-talented and versatile Kudrow is a far cry from her ditzy typecast, but she acknowledges her hard work in that genre of acting. “I’d played dumbasses a lot. On Mad About You, I played a very dumb waitress and the [Friends producers] saw me.”
After The Comeback wraps its season, Kudrow has no plans set for future projects, but she has not ruled out doing more television. “I like doing The Comeback. One fantasy is that I just do a Don Roos movie every year if that’s possible, if he’d have me.”
Happy Endings opens Friday. |
