(Photo Credit: Suzanne Hanover/ ) - Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy and Wendi McLendon-Covey in ‘Bridesmaids.’
After a half-hour conversation with actress Melissa McCarthy, one might be inclined to assume she’s the most levelheaded, regular person on planet Earth.
She’s the sort of woman who plans to make “a big shark cake” for her elder daughter’s fourth birthday and who actually uses the word “gosh” in a sentence while discussing someone who publicly insulted her. She even grew up on a farm in Plainfield, Ill., a place that clearly deserves an award for Most Normal-Sounding City in America.
But somewhere beneath all that vaguely Midwestern-accented pleasantness lurks an unhinged, bizarre woman. The movie “Bridesmaids” — which opens Friday and stars McCarthy in a performance that achieves new heights in freaky-deaky comedy — is evidence of that fact. It’s also evidence that McCarthy, a veteran TV actress and bit player in studio films, may finally start getting recognition as one of Hollywood’s most fearlessly funny ladies.
“The women I really love to portray are kind of extreme, fringe, always confident but like, off,” says McCarthy, 40, calling from a Ritz-Carlton in New York while on the “Bridesmaids” promotional circuit.
So off, in fact, that McCarthy — known mainly from her work on shows such as “Gilmore Girls,” “Samantha Who?” and, more recently, CBS’s “Mike & Molly” — was a little worried about reading for the part of Megan, the nuclear engineer in “Bridesmaids” who steals puppies, has no inside voice and thinks “Fight Club” would make a totally solid theme for a bridal shower. “I went in and auditioned and thought, oh, I’m probably going to be too weird,” she says. “But I had such a sense of her immediately. Then I thought, I’m going to do it how I want to and most likely they’re going to say, ‘Thank you. That was super-weird. Please leave.’ ”
But “Bridesmaids” co-writer Annie Mumolo — who, like McCarthy and many of the women associated with “Bridesmaids,” was part of the Los Angeles improv troupe the Groundlings — says McCarthy nailed it: “When you have the abilities that Melissa has, she can get as weird as it gets. But she can also play Sookie St. James on ‘Gilmore Girls.’ When you have that range, it’s like, where’s the sweet spot for this character? Where is it in the range? She landed right on it.”
Playing the role opposite talents and fellow Groundling alums such as Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph called for lots of improvisation. (“The main thing was just trying not to laugh,” McCarthy says.) It also required her to embrace physical comedy in a way that is routine for the Jack Blacks and Kevin Jameses of the world but far rarer for a woman.
When McCarthy lifts up her leg and starts caressing her calf in an attempt to recruit an air marshal into the Mile High Club, it plays like a triumphant, albeit really odd, moment for summer-movie female empowerment. (That air marshal, by the way, is played by McCarthy’s husband, actor Ben Falcone.) “She’s not very middle-of-the-road,” McCarthy says of Megan. “I feel confident in saying that.”
While McCarthy always enjoyed making people laugh — she remembers singing silly songs as a child for her mother, then demanding detailed critiques — she originally wanted to become a fashion designer. She majored in textiles at Southern Illinois University and eventually found herself designing costumes for plays.
The Post Most: LifestyleMost-viewed stories,videos, and galleries in the past two hours
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments