ROLE CALL: Susan Sarandon as Pearl (left) and Melissa McCarthy as Tammy in New Line Cinema’s comedy Tammy, a Warner Bros Pictures release.

 

By Rebecca Keegan

 

One humid night last June, on a dock along one of Wilmington’s winding creeks, Melissa McCarthy and Kathy Bates took their places for a scene in the new movie Tammy. Five years earlier, McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, had written the role with Bates in mind —  the Oscar winner was to deliver a needed dressing down to McCarthy’s title character, a perennial screw-up.

On set the crew was hushed, the only sound the clicking of cicadas in some nearby oak trees and the water lapping at the dock. Everyone seemed aware that something important was happening ... except the guy in a boat across the lagoon who started playing techno music.

“Do we have anybody over there with a $100 bill?” McCarthy shouted as a crew member was dispatched to solve the problem.

Twenty minutes later when the shoot was done, McCarthy rose, walked to the end of the dock and started crying, overwhelmed by the emotion of the moment.

“It’s a scene we wrote for Kathy Bates, dreamed of her doing, she’s actually here doing it and now she’s summoned all of her power, which is a lot,” McCarthy said, explaining her reaction back in Los Angeles. “It was a palpable, amazing feeling. It felt like a lightning bolt ripping through my chest.”

For much of the movie, McCarthy plays the kind of character audiences have come to expect of her —  an outrageous woman with big appetites and little judgment. But there are also dramatic moments, like the one with Bates on the dock, that reveal the beating heart underneath all the funny wigs, oversized T-shirts and unflattering shoes.

Tammy is part of a transition McCarthy is trying to make in her career. Make no mistake, she’s still a peerless physical comedian who uses her size and foul mouth to side-splitting comic effect. But she’s also a relatable human being here, one whom audiences won’t just laugh at.

McCarthy has the opportunity to try this evolution thanks to her increasing power in Hollywood as a rare female star who can guarantee an audience for a film.

For the actress, Tammy is a dream project. It’s one she and Falcone —  making his feature directing debut —  started planning long before her breakout performance in 2011’s Bridesmaids and starring roles in the subsequent box office hits Identity Thief and The Heat earned her the kind of career where dreams come true.

“(Ben) said, ‘I think I can write something so that you can actually get to do what you like doing, which is being kind of an extreme character but then actually being able to play the heart of it,’” McCarthy said. “’It would be nice to write something so you could do that,’ which was incredibly sweet of him, and at the time the odds of us doing it were ... I don’t think we ever thought it was gonna be an actual movie.”

In person, in red lipstick, a black silk blouse and pants, McCarthy projects a polish and a sweetness that seem antithetical to many of her characters and in particular to Tammy, who spends a lot of the film dropping F-bombs while wearing a shirt with a cartoon bear on it and a pair of Crocs.

After losing her job, her husband and her dignity, Tammy piles into a late-model Cadillac to drive to Niagara Falls with Pearl, her alcoholic, diabetic grandmother, played by Susan Sarandon, in a frumpy wig and prosthetic swollen ankles.

Falcone has a small part as Tammy’s unsympathetic boss at a fast-food restaurant; Mark Duplass is Bobby, a charming guy Tammy meets along the way in a bar; and Bates is Lenore, Tammy’s highly functional cousin, a no-nonsense businesswoman with a giant plantation-style home and a happy marriage to Susanne (Sandra Oh).

“I love all the women I’ve played,” McCarthy said. “I know why they mess up. They want to hurt somebody before they get hurt. ... They’re trying so hard to be better people. I really always think they have a valid point in their point of view. Maybe I like them too much, I’m defensive for them.”

Falcone, 40, and McCarthy, 43, both grew up in Illinois but first met as members of Los Angeles’ improv comedy group the Groundlings in the late 1990s, quickly discovering a shared appreciation of the absurd.

In one skit they performed together, as the Jethro Tull song Locomotive Breath played in the background, McCarthy was a woman working unhappily at a train station. Falcone, dressed in a silver suit, enticed people at the station to be nicer to her. At some point during the song’s instrumental interlude, McCarthy pulled a flute out of her sleeve.

“I thought she was real cute and funny,” Falcone said. “We had a quick connection where I felt like, ‘she’s here, and she makes this room good,’ and then I was like, ‘Oh, wait, she makes other rooms good —  hey, she’s making everything good.’”

The character Tammy, with all of her immaturity, shares DNA with McCarthy in her 20s, the actress admits, a time when she made coffee at a Starbucks in Santa Monica, among other jobs, while attempting to get her performing career off the ground.

“All through my 20s I worked so hard, so many jobs, but still, you’d go out one night and it’s like, there goes a chunk of my rent money,” McCarthy said. “It’s a feeling of, ‘I don’t want to grow up, I want it to be easier.’ ... All of us, you run in those cycles where you know exactly what you’re screwing up doing.

“Intellectually you always know what your faults are, how to fix them, what would make it better. Engaging in those practices is entirely another thing. Those are lifelong struggles for people. ... One of the most fun things to figure out in a character is, ‘What’s the struggle? What do they know is better and what do they choose?’”

Falcone and McCarthy married in 2005 and have two daughters, Vivian, 7, and Georgette, 4. —  Los Angeles Times/MCT

 

 

Jennifer Garner, a patient wife!

 

Actress Jennifer Garner is not so happy with her husband and actor Ben Affleck’s obsession with gambling and hates seeing negative things written about him in the press but has decided to support him. The 41-year-old was reportedly banned from playing blackjack at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas in April after he was caught counting cards. “She never understood his gambling obsession and she doesn’t want him to be in the news (for it), (but) she’s the most patient wife ever and is still very much in love with Ben,” people.com quoted a source as saying. Meanwhile, the 42-year-old actress flew to Detroit in Michigan, where Affleck is filming his new movie Batman vs Superman, this weekend to celebrate their ninth wedding anniversary.

The actor reportedly bought his gorgeous wife some expensive jewellery from Barneys in Beverly Hills last week to mark their wedding anniversary. —  IANS

 

Johnny Depp loves
discount vouchers

 

Actor Johnny Depp is reportedly obsessed with discount vouchers. The Pirates of the Caribbean star, who is worth approximately £200mn, has reportedly become a regular user of online discount site Groupon, from which he recently bought a discounted barbecue grill, reports contactmusic.com.

‘’Johnny can’t resist a bargain, and he loves it when Groupon’s deal of the day arrives in his e-mail inbox. If he can get a good price for something, he’ll go for it. He just bought a new barbecue for the patio of his house in LA,” said a source. The 51-year-old also uses discount vouchers to buy his fiancee Amber Heard gifts, and to get money off their meals at top restaurants. —  IANS