Ben Stiller proves he can be a bad boy like the best of them in Neil LaBute‘s “Your Friends and Neighbors.” While he spent his time in films like “There’s Something About Mary” and “Zero Effect” being the sensitive fall guy, Stiller strikes back this time as a philandering drama professor.
“Your Friends and Neighbors” is the latest writing/directorial effort by Neil LaBute. His previous outing, “In the Company of Men,” was a brutally honest look at two misogynists who decide to take out their frustrations by breaking the heart of a female co-worker. This time around, he cast Stiller as a key player in another no-holds-barred sexual expose.
Stiller, Jason Patric, and Aaron Eckhart play best friends whose bond doesn’t prevent them from playing musical beds with Catherine Keener, Amy Brenneman, and Nastassja Kinski, the women in their lives. In the end, their petty rivalries and betrayals cause them all more emotional pain than they bargained for. Stiller credited the realism of his on-screen friendship with Patric and Eckhart to an unusually long three-week rehearsal held before the shoot.
“We just had a really great camaraderie,” he said. “The rehearsal period was fun and we all hung out together and then spent a weekend away before the shoot. And we had a great time just hanging out as people.”
Stiller plays Jerry, a drama professor whose over-analyzing tendencies infuriate his girlfriend Terry, played by Keener. Among other things, she hates the way he won’t stop talking while they’re having sex. Looking for a little more peace in bed, Stiller turns his eye to Mary (Brenneman), his friend Barry’s (Eckhart‘s) wife. When she also rejects him, he moves on to one of his female drama students. While Stiller acknowledged that Jerry’s behavior is inexcusable, he thinks audiences shouldn’t reject it out of hand.
“It’s very easy for an audience to disconnect from this if they’re not in touch with themselves. They’d say, ‘Oh well, those people are really screwed up,'” he said.
“For me, that’s what’s so great about this movie. It’s almost a barometer of the people who watch it. Like certain people I know will watch it and go, ‘What was that? Those people were horrible. They were so screwed up.’ And those are the people who I know are totally in denial about everything that’s going on in their lives.”
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Stiller said that it wasn’t too hard to play such an unlikeable character. However, it was essential that he find a balance between understanding Jerry’s motivations and acting as if he didn’t.
“I just understood what that guy was going through,” he said. “I felt, at some point in my life, I could see being where that guy was. And seeing how in the film it just doesn’t get him anything. So for me it was about understanding how to drop my awareness of what he was doing to screw himself up.”
So far, Stiller‘s taken turns playing “the guy pining for his high school crush” and “the guy who can’t choose between his work and his wife,” in “There’s Something About Mary” and “Zero Effect,” respectively. The chance to finally play the lady-killer was one he was glad he didn’t pass up.
“I wouldn’t have done this movie if it was the only movie I did last year,” he said. “Because… I did ‘Permanent Midnight’ before that, and then I did ‘(There’s) Something About Mary’ after it, and that was to me a very different role than this guy. So I like the idea of being able to play lots of different characters, so that (people are) not going to keep on putting me into the same thing.”
“Permanent Midnight” is scheduled for a fall release, and it promises to cause a similar splash with Stiller playing real-life television writer Jerry Stahl. The movie is based on Stahl’s own autobiography recounting his Hollywood rise and then fall due to heroin addiction.
“He had this whole other life where he was shooting cocaine and shooting heroin, and living in crack houses in East L.A.,” said Stiller. “(He) basically had a whole world where everybody who he dealt with in the show business world didn’t have any idea what was going on. It imploded on him, and he just couldn’t handle it.”
