'Step Brothers': Q&A with Adam McKay, Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
|
Monday, June 23, 2008
HW: Are your characters formers spouses mentioned at all and what kind of affect they have on them?
MS: Well actually the only time they were mentioned was in the improvised toast at the wedding. There wasn’t even supposed to be a toast at the wedding, but we did an improvisation where John makes a toast to his stepmother in front of me and tells all the reasons he wishes she were here right now. He says, ‘I know that that woman is just probably good for sex, but not for anything else.’ Then Will talks about his father and says he works for some oil company in Iraq and Will is still suffering about the divorce, but it was 25 years ago or something.
HW: Can you talk about the freedom of working in an R rated environment?
AM: It’s probably bad in a way because we love it so much. Literally you’ll do scenes and you’ll say f**k like 30 times and you’re like, ‘this is too much.’ But it’s great. It’s fantastic and you don’t even think about anything you say. You just do whatever you want. Anytime you hear Mary Steenburgen f**k and f**k.
MS: That’s his favorite thing by the way.
HW: Do you ever get an actor to refuse to say something that you shout out?
AM: Cris Collinsworth the wide receiver, the guy who does NFL Today. He came on and he was playing Will’s boss just for two lines and I kept giving me dirty things to say because it was Cris Collinsworth. It was a bit of joke casting for us. An inside joke to Will. He would not curse. He kept changing it every time. So that will happen sometimes or the phrasing is so strange the person can’t say it, but 98% of the time they always say it. Mary is probably the toughest as far as people I’ve worked with.
MS: I didn’t know not saying it was an option. I’m glad to hear that.
AM: Real often Mary will do the line [but] say, “you’re the one who is going to hell.” And Richard does the opposite. He goes worse than what I say. Richard has these great dark emotional pockets in him from Rhode Island. It’s the deadly winters of Providence that keep coming out on set.
Photo: Mary Steenburgen (Daily Celeb)