2) Don’t Constrain Your Star
McCarthy’s atypical-for-Hollywood figure and willingness to commit to a bit has made her easy to box into two types of roles: the supportive sad sack, and the foul-mouthed bully. Spy wisely allows McCarthy to play at both ends of the spectrum. There’s a turn midway through the film that forces Cooper to adopt a new persona, and on a dime she pivots from being a timid doormat to a ball-busting alpha dog. It’s a shift that doesn’t risk stretching the premise, because the movie has already established that Cooper’s incompetence is more a matter of self-confidence than skills.
But the more important thing that Feig’s script does is choose not to stick to just those two sides of the equation. Cooper has to filter her own multi-faceted personality through the various identities she has to adopt, and the result is a performance from McCarthy that’s incredibly nuanced. Spy’s sense of humor often goes big and broad, but McCarthy’s versatility allows her to pitch jokes with a number of different curves and speeds. By the end of the film, Cooper has firmly established relationships with almost every major supporting character, each reflecting one of the many different roles McCarthy has had to carry up until this point. Speaking of which…
