Actor Melissa McCarthy on winding up Trump, using ‘humour as healthcare’ and why she’s had enough of Hollywood’s ‘screamers and egos’
, 2013, “I can be much better off in life. I spend a lot of my work day just… shredding people, so I’m not screaming at someone at a stoplight because they didn’t go the second it turned green. I can wait a minute. I’m fine. Maybe that’s something that everyone should be able to do,” eviscerate a colleague for fun, “as easy as taking a spin class.” Utopia is a place where everyone has the opportunity to tell Sandra Bullock we’ll chew off her eyelids, then breathe, laugh and move on.
Before hiring anybody new for a film, she and Falcone perform what they call a “crazy check”, to see if they’re nice. They don’t just expect kindness on their sets, “We demand it.” She marvels, suddenly, leaning backwards on a cream sofa the size of a swimming pool, “You know, we were so astounded and grateful at getting to build our own little worlds, we were like, ‘We have to build the one we’ve always talked about, where everybody gets to have an opinion and everyone is really nice.
Has she had experience then, of screamers and egos? She pauses. Yes. “I did work for someone once who ran such a volatile, hostile set that it made me physically ill. My eyes were swelling up, I was absorbing all of this nuttiness.” What did it look like? “There were people weeping, visibly so upset by this one person. And I think that’s why the manipulation worked, because to get to me, this person would fire people I loved, which kept me quiet. It was very effective.
McCarthy has always had 60 in her head, as the age at which she’ll start wearing exclusively kaftans and turbans, and embrace her true beard-guy self. “But now I’m like, I don’t want to wait until 60, actually.” Which doesn’t mean she wants to retire. No, she wants to work even harder, but with that kaftan kind of freedom. “It’s a fist fight to try to get comedies made right now. And I don’t know why, because we’ve never needed to laugh more.
This impulse is a trait that she shares with the characters she plays, a compulsion to question the modern world and a bawdy confidence, which inevitably makes everything better. “Actually,” she adds, quite serious now, “I would not mind spending a day on the street corner just randomly complimenting people, really loudly. ‘You have terrific pants on,’ or ‘I love your fringe!’” She thinks for a second. “I’m going to have to do it, aren’t I?” I’m pretty sure, I tell her, she already is.
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