You and Lucy Punch have a lot of great scenes in this film and you each have this tremendous comic energy that keeps pouring out. What was it like working with her?
Tyler Labine: Lucy is the best. Lucy and I had done a movie called A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, which was also another kind of raunchy comedy. I really hit it off with Lucy then, even though we didn’t have that much to do together, but I remember thinking this girl’s really talented and then I saw her pop up all over the place. She was in a constant state of what they call blowing up for a few years. And then we did a dark Canadian comedy called Cottage Country with her and Malin Akerman like two years ago. Lucy came in and did four or five days on that and everyone was like, “Oh my god she’s so good! She’s so funny and weird!”
When I found out that she was doing this movie I was ecstatic because she’s been doing the same thing that I’ve been doing forever, which is playing these funny, scene stealing sidekick characters, and doing it better than anybody that I had ever seen. And I was like, “this is going to be so great!” We had a couple luxurious days of going over the script and sort of chatting with Rob about those lines that we were just previously discussing and whether we were going to intentionally cross them or not, and then he just kind of let us go.
Rob just let her and I kind of riff and find this love story with these really disgusting characters, and that was really fun to play because we were both like ‘well, let’s just play it like we’re like any other average sappy romantic comedy, but let’s talk about yeast infections and boners.’ We can talk about it with that same intent, you know? It has that same spin of being sweet with each other, but we’re talking about disgusting things. So that was really fun to play that with her.
Yeah, it definitely looks like you two were having a lot of fun. You had already talked about what you did with the script before the movie started, but what kind of stuff did you bring to the movie that wasn’t in the script originally?
Tyler Labine: Well, Rob Pearlstein hired I’d say a whole gaggle of improv actors and I don’t think that was a mistake. There’s a really healthy mix of scripted versus improv material in the movie, but as far as elements that we brought to the script that weren’t in there or maybe were there but it could be mined for gold or whatever, there wasn’t much. Rob really put down a solid foundation with a good script. The foundation was unshakeable, and I feel that’s the best environment to improv in and like fool around. If it’s a solid foundation, you can’t wreck it.
The one thing I will sort of take a little bit of credit for is the cab scene when Lucy and I meet. That was the last scene we shot of the movie, and it was really late at night. It was like 2 in the morning on Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard doing this little loop, and we shot it in like six or seven different ways with coverage and all the stuff. And then Rob basically said, “Okay, now you guys just blow it out, do two or three runs at it where you just do whatever and we’ll just shoot it in this two shot.” And that’s basically the shot that stayed in the movie. There are the bits of script that we use to steer the scene, but it’s just a giant improvisation exploration (laughs).
The cab scene between you and Lucy is fantastic because the way you two warmed up to each other wasn’t just funny, if felt real.
Tyler Labine: That’s my favorite scene in the whole movie. I mean, there were a lot of great moments that we shot earlier on, but it’s just that scene when we were the most informed at that point of who these characters were. It was very intentional that Rob left that as the last thing to shoot. We were ready. We were thinking about that scene for months.
Do you know a lot of Barrys out there in the world and did you base your character on any of them?
Tyler Labine: (Laughs) Yeah, I have a Barry. I’m not going to name who it is but he probably knows who he is. He might not. That’s the thing, the rule is if you don’t know who the Barry in your group is, it’s you. You’re the Barry. There are Barrys, and I love that term. Leading up to the movie, that two terms that really stuck with me are twunt and Barry. I feel bad for actual Barrys, people who have been named Barry, because they are not always a Barry. But if you’re a twunt, then you are definitely a twunt.
I think you guys may have invented the term twunt.
Tyler Labine: I think that’s a Rob Pearlstein invention. I’ve been using it. I don’t walk around quoting myself from the movie, but I’m quoting Rob. Rob came up with an awesome swear word. How often do you get an awesome description for assholes? It’s great.
We’d like to thank Tyler for sitting down with We Got This Covered. Be sure to check out Someone Marry Barry, now on VOD.
