STACK #150 Apr 2017

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almost while they’re watching the movie. You might, in the early scenes, think that James’s character is so extreme and how could anybody be with him? How could any woman really be in love with him? But as it goes on, I think you start to realize, “This guy, he’s sweet. He wants a family. He really loves this woman. He loves this dad and mom and brother.” And Bryan’s character is kind of an everyman type of dad who is struggling to hold on in a world that is evolving faster than he can process. He can’t accept that life involves change.

John Hamburg on set with KISS

Because he had it all five or ten years ago. His life was

who are brilliant comedians, but who also have real drama chops, because in my movies, the characters themselves think they’re in a drama. It’s only the world that is comedic. So I really wanted Bryan, and James perfectly embodied a guy who has no filter and says what he wants. He is really sweet and has a heart of gold, and is smart and thoughtful. But you may just not quite understand him at first blush. I didn’t know James well. We knew each other a little bit, but what I knew of his work and knowing him a tiny bit, it felt like he would be perfect. That to me was the dream cast. The two characters at the centre of this film really don’t get on, but they’re both really nice guys deep down. How essential was that to making the story work? The idea wasn’t that there’s a villain and a hero, or that their characters are black and white, because I find

perfect, everything was going well. He had a business. But the world changes so rapidly, and I thought that was an interesting thing to explore, through these two flawed, but ultimately good-hearted, humans.

Bryan was well-known for Malcolm , but it’s another level after Breaking

Bad . Is it fun to play with the iconography he brings to it?

Walter White started as a pretty normal every day guy

Absolutely. That happened in Meet the Parents with Robert De Niro. It was like, “What if the guy from Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Goodfellas was your father-in-law?” Obviously people know Bryan as Walter White, and we’re saying, you know, Walter White started as a pretty normal every day guy. He became Heisenberg, but what if instead he’s that guy and he’s the ultimate dad. But he’s got an edge to him. In Malcolm his character, I think, had less edge than Ned does in Why Him? He doesn’t go as far as Walter White, becoming Heisenberg. But he tries to hack into Franco’s computer. He does some fairly extreme things. It’s kind of a merging almost of those two characters, in a weird way.

that people aren’t like that in real life. One happens to be this extreme, quite wealthy tech mogul, but he’s still a human being. That was really important to me, to try to create these dynamic, fully-fleshed out characters, and have the audience’s perceptions change

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