Transcript
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Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.
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Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
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“Huddle Formation” from the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team. A fast, upbeat, peppy song. Music plays as Jesse speaks, then fades out.
jesse thorn
It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. My first guests this week are Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. Odds are, you already know one those names. Melissa McCarthy is what we like to call in the business a comedy superstar. She had unforgettable parts in Bridesmaids, Gilmore Girls, The Heat, Spy. Ben is her husband and creative partner. The two of them met when they were members of The Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles. They’ve been performing together onstage and onscreen for almost 20 years. When I talked with Melissa and Ben, in 2014, they’d just collaborated on their first feature length film: Tammy. Falcone cowrote and directed the movie. It turned out to be a solid formula. Together, the two have made five movies. The latest is Thunder Force—a superhero comedy which was released earlier this year. In Tammy, Melissa plays the title character: a midwestern woman whose life is a mess. So, she goes on a road trip with her alcoholic grandmother in an attempt to get out of her hometown for good. Here’s a clip from one of the inciting incidents: Tammy getting fired from her fast-food job. Her boss, in this scene, is played by Falcone. Oh, and one visual thing you might miss listening to the clip: at the end, yes, she is flipping him off.
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Keith (Tammy): Tammy. I’m terminating your employment at Topper Jack’s, and I need your badge. Tammy: What badge? You mean my nametag?! Keith: Yes, exactly. I need your badge. I need your badge back. Tammy: [Irritated.] It’s not a badge! It’s a nametag and you made me buy it with my own money. Keith: That’s company policy! I need it back! Tammy: Well, I need you to stop sweating through your shirts and grossing everybody out. Keith: [Sighs heavily.] It is hot and when it’s hot people sweat. That’s how it is. Tammy: [Interrupting.] Not like that. Keith: Tammy, you have already been fired. I have already terminated your employment. You are at least 40 seconds fired, so please exit the Topper Jack’s.
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Tammy: Fine. You know what? I’m gonna give you this. Keith: [Flatly.] Tammy. Tammy: I got it, here. Keith: It’s your middle finger. Tammy: Nope! Poooom. Read between the lines. Keith: I knew that you were gonna do it, Tammy! So, it’s not as good! I get it, Tammy. Tammy: Boooom! You get that? Keith: [Beat.] What is that? Tammy: Little version of this.
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jesse
[Laughing.] Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy, welcome to Bullseye. It’s great to have you on the show.
melissa mccarthy
Thank you so much.
ben falcone
Thank you.
melissa
It’s great to be here.
jesse
So, Melissa, I read that you are a wig collector.
melissa
I am! I have a rrrreal fondness for a wig. It started even before The Groundlings. But The Groundlings really sealed the deal. The theatre—sketch improv theatre that we belonged to in Los Angeles just—every new wig was like a whole new person I’d get to meet. So, I became kind of an addict.
jesse
How many live at your house?
melissa
[Seriously.] A bunch. [They giggle.] A lot! You know, I left most of them—when we finally stepped out from The Groundlings, I probably donated about 50.
ben
Yeah, but that was almost—I sort of ran intervention. [Melissa cackles.] I was like, “Look. You’re not using them right now. You can always come back and ask for them back.”
melissa
True, true. And on my own free will I left them, but I probably took ten home. [Jesse laughs.] But then every movie—every single movie starts with the wig. I go—the second—the second I have a part, I go, and I look for a wig and it starts the whole process.
jesse
I also read somewhere that you lost a wig at the bottom of a lake during the filming of Tammy, and I thought, “Well, that would hurt extra bad for a wig enthusiast.”
melissa
It hurt—it hurt on so many levels, because—you know—we didn’t have a huge budget for Tammy and those wigs are—you know, these are not the wigs I wore in the theatre, which were—you know—50 bucks, 30 bucks. This was like a five-, six-thousand-dollar wig and on our safety test run for the jet ski, I flipped myself off at about 40 miles an hour and ripped my wig. And it was pinned. We had probably 30, 40 pins crossed in it, so you couldn’t have pulled it off with your bare hands and yet I hit that water so hard. There’s a wig—there’s a Tammy wig at the bottom of Wilmington lake.
keith
Yeah. North Carolina ate a wig. [Melissa chuckles.]
jesse
Melissa, can you tell me a little bit about what you were like in high school? You grew up with folks that commuted to—commuted to Chicago for work, but you actually lived on a farm. Right?
melissa
I did. We—my dad grew up on the southside of Chicago and he wanted to raise, you know, his kids outside of the city. He—so—and my mom was kind of a—was more of a farmgirl from a little town about, you know, an hour and a half south of Chicago. So, once they started having kids, they moved out to Plainfield and we—they rented this farmhouse on a corn and soybean farm. And my mom—my dad commuted every day of his career into Chicago. About—you know, probably an hour. And my mom, though, worked closer. She just worked in Plainfield or in Joliet—another little close town. But yeah, grew up—grew up, you know, way out—about three miles outside of town, gravel roads, barns, a strange amount of cats.
jesse
What was it like for you when you were in high school?
melissa
In high school I was pretty, uh… you know, I would—I—I was pretty active. I played tennis. I was really, really into tennis. Very competitive with tennis. I was a cheerleader, and I did student council and had lots of friends and then somewhere—like the end of sophomore year, I kind of just started thinking, “What’s going on in Chicago? What’s going on outside of this little—tiny little town where we do the same football game every week and the same this and it’s the same people. And the next thing I know, I was going out to downtown Chicago, listening to music and—you know—dancing at clubs and just really having a fun time and it, you know, changed my whole style. I kind of dropped out of things and I start—I got very gothic and very punk.
jesse
Ben, you’re also from Illinois. How does all of this compare with what you were like in high school?
ben
I was, uhhh—let’s see. I—you know, I wasn’t a, you know, goth. I grew up in Carbondale, Illinois, which is a little town in the southern part of Illinois, a Little Egypt area apparently. Which I have no idea why that is what it’s called. [Melissa chuckles.] You know, I wasn’t trying to make a statement or anything. I just was sort of, you know, just one of the [chuckling]—one of the gang or something like that.
jesse
When the two of you met in Groundlings, did you immediately recognize some sort of essential Illinoisiness?
ben
We had to do an opening like, you know, exercise. Like a get-to-know-you thing, which are actually good in classes. They’re horrifying when you’re in a circle and like, “Oh my gosh, I have to say something.” But, you know, she—but it’s good because then everyone—the weird part is out of the way first. And so, she says, “You know, I went to school in a place that nobody ever heard of. It’s called Carbondale.” And, you know, so then it was cool for me, because, you know, six people later I could say, “Actually, I’m from Carbondale!” You know? [Jesse chuckles.] I knew! So, she—not only did I notice, but she literally said her Illinoisness. So, I didn’t have to be a detective.
melissa
Yeah, I—when I went to Carbondale—I went to SIU for college and I’m three years older than Ben, so he was still in high school. And the band—the house that we would go to every single weekend to listen to bands play in the basement, it is and was directly across the street from Ben’s house where he was living. [Ben confirms.] So, ten years before I met him, I literally spent every weekend listening to like weird, local punk bands in this—in this house.
ben
Yeah, well the punk band that played there every week was called Diet Christ. [They laugh.] And my parents—you know, of course my parents, they moved in to like—to sort of a student, you know, neighborhood and they—but they didn’t know when they bought the house that they were across the street from the Lost Cross House, is what it’s called for some reason. [Melissa laughs quietly.] And you know, it was where Diet Christ played every [laughing]—every week.
melissa
And I was there listening! [Giggles.]
ben
Yep! And then she was there with, you know, blue hair and—you know, loving the music, I guess.
jesse
Do you remember, Ben, your first impression of Melissa when you met her?
ben
Yeah, I do. I mean, I remember—right away, I thought she was pretty, and I thought she seemed really nice and then she—the very first day, we had to do, you know, monologues and she, in my opinion, did the funniest one and I just—right off the bat, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I hope we can hang out.” And then we—you know, our seats were next to each other, so that was great. And I remember feeling like, you know, right off the first day that we were—we were kind of in cahoots. Not in a like a clique-y way like I didn’t wanna meet other people in the class or anything, but I just felt like I had kind of a fun partner to go through this class with. And then, you know, what was great was we just got closer and closer every day from then.
jesse
What about you, Melissa? Do you remember?
melissa
I do. I remember the first day. I know you had to go up and do your—you know, do a monologue and then we were gonna improvise later and every—everybody kind of—you know, it’s the first day of class. It’s the third level of Groundlings. And I think everybody wanted to really bring the thunder and show their big, crazy character and everyone—including myself—went, you know, big and had—it was all the—you know, things were loud, and characters were crazy. And then Ben pulled up a chair and I don’t even know if anyone else had sat. Like even that seemed different. And he sat and he did the quietest, like soft-spoken inmate and it was so creepy and almost like—just walking the line of, “Is it creepy or is it funny?” And of course, it really made me laugh, but it made everyone kind of lean forward and really have to listen. And I just thought it was really interesting that he didn’t do what everybody else did. He didn’t—he didn’t feel the need to like demand—like command attention through, you know, his volume or craziness.
ben
Yeah, but for me I was probably just really nervous, and I felt like if I stand, I could pass out. [Melissa giggles.] I mean, I’ll just—you know, I’ll sit and then, you know, I was probably too scared to yell. I’ll just be quiet and maybe I’ll just get through this first one.
jesse
Even more with Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone still to come. Stay with us. It’s Bullseye, from MaximumFun.org and NPR.
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jesse
It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. My guests are Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. The husband and wife duo just made the new superhero comedy Thunder Force. I wanna play a clip of my guests, Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy, in the movie Bridesmaids. So, Melissa is one of the—one of the bridesmaids and all of them are together on this airplane to Los Vegas and she sits down next to Ben Falcone, her real-life husband but in the movie a character we haven’t seen before. And, yeah, so he’s totally—he’s entirely a stranger to her and this is just right when she sits down.
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Megan (Bridesmaids): No carryon, huh? Jon: No. Megan: Yeah, I noticed. I noticed you didn’t put anything in the overhead bin, either. I get it. I get it. I want you to know, uh, protect and serve air marshal style. Jon: What? Megan: I don’t wanna infringe on your privacy, man. I just, uh—I really appreciate what you do for this country, and I respect the hell out of you. Jon: [Beat.] That’s great. I’m not an air marshal. I’m gonna take a nap. Megan: Awesome. Jon: Cool. Megan: I’ll take first watch. Jon: I’m not an air marshal. There’s no—you don’t need to take a watch. Megan: Okay. [Whispering.] I got the first watch.
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ben
[They laugh.] Oh boy.
jesse
I mean, a lot of folks have seen Bridesmaids and know the levels of vulgarity that it goes to from there. That’s the part we can play on the radio. [They chuckle and Melissa agrees.] At what point did the two—at what point were the two of you romantically involved in addition to working together?
melissa
About—what, about a year? [Ben confirms.] A year after we met. I think we were afraid to, you know—we’d become kind of best friends and I think we were a little nervous to screw that up, but about a year in, we were—we were dating.
ben
We decided we would risk it.
jesse
Were you already working on Gilmore Girls by then, Melissa?
melissa
No. Not yet. I… I feel like it was—
ben
You were doing production work at that time. [Melissa confirms.]
jesse
It’s such a funny thing, because you were so lovely on Gilmore Girls and—
melissa
Aw, thanks.
jesse
Your character on that show is so far from the characters that you’ve become famous for playing in movies, which is to say that she is very sweet and turns inward on herself and falls apart when stuff—when stuff goes crazy. And I wonder like—I wonder to what extent you are someone who wants to face challenges by going big and to what extend you’re someone who wants to face challenges by, you know, turning inward?
melissa
I don’t know. I’m—personally, I think I’m probably a little of both. I’m in no way—no way near as bold as the characters I’ve been playing lately. I think that’s the fun of playing them, for me. I do not kick a door in and kind of take over a room and, you know, yell at people. I think that is not my style at all.
ben
That would be tricky in our house, for one thing. [They giggle.]
melissa
Like, yeah, our kids would never go for it, anyway. But yeah, I mean, I think I’m probably more… reflective of, you know, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I not doing the right thing?” I—you know, I bounce everything off of Ben and so I probably go a lot smaller with my reactions than people would expect.
jesse
I feel like the perfect example of you going totally ape is this scene—you had a relatively small part in This is 40, the Judd Apatow film. [Melissa confirms.] And this is like as much of it as we can play, even with bleeps, reasonable. [Melissa laughs.] But basically, the leads in the movie are Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann and they’re a married couple and they get called into the principal’s office for a meeting with your character, because they have had some beef with your character over their—the three character’s respective children. So, this is you in a meeting with Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann and the principal.
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Debbie (This is 40):Your son has been defiling my daughter’s Facebook page now for months. Catherine: These people are liars! He said that my son was an animal and that if I didn’t keep him on a leash, that he would hit him with his car! Principal: Did you say that? Pete: That’s—that’s ridiculous. Who talks like that? Catherine: You do. Debbie: He didn’t say that— Catherine: He said it to me! Pete: Alright, you know—no, what I said was that we need to keep an extra eye on our kids, because—with all the technological advances—uh, they need to learn to use them responsibly. Catherine: No. No, what he—what he said to me was he called me an [censored].
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Pete: What?! Principal: Language, Catherine! Language! Catherine: I’m quoting! How am I gonna relay what these two nutballs said to me unless I say it?! Principal: Can you please not talk like that, Catherine. Music Man is rehearsing next-door. Catherine: [Yelling.] Sorry! [Censored] Music Man! Principal: None of this talk is productive. Catherine: I would like to rear up and jackknife my legs and kick you both in the [censored] jaw with my foot bone. Debbie: You’re just really scaring me. Catherine: This is what happens when you corner a rat. You corner me?! I will [censored] chew through you. I’ll chew through you!
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melissa
[Jesse cackles.] Geeeez. Oh my god.
jesse
There’s a version of that that plays over the credits that’s just a solid four- or five-minute take of that. [Ben laughs.] And it only gets more profane and intense.
melissa
It just gets terrible. It’s—I, when I watched that—I didn’t know Judd was gonna keep all of that stuff in the end. And when I actually finally watched it, I had little to no memory of the horrible things I had said. [Jesse laughs.] It was like watching it and hearing it for the first time. I was completely horrified.
ben
Yeah, I remember she came home, and I said, “How was, you know, today?” And she said, “Oh, I—it was—it was really fun.” And then I said, “Well, what?” You know, ‘cause she was obviously not saying one—something. [Melissa chuckles.] And she said, “Weeell, right at the end—I mean, I was—they were encouraging me. I think I—you know, and everyone seemed to think it was fine, but I was just saying such horrible things. I feel bad.” [Chuckling.] And I was like, “No! It’s your—it wasn’t you! It was a—you know, it’s a character!” And then she said, “Yeah, I just don’t even remember what I said.”
jesse
There’s an amazing scene in Tammy which has been—is, I think—I think it’s in the trailer as well, where you—your character, Tammy, is pumping herself up to rob a fast-food store. I wanna play a clip, which immediately follows this wild—‘cause it’s sort of like a Where the Wild Things Are, “Let the wild rumpus start,” type situation. [They laugh and Ben agrees.] In this montage set to Macklemore, right? [They confirm.] And you immediately are slammed into this robbery scene, and it’s quickly revealed that, despite the best of intentions or the worst of intentions, this character Tammy—who’s, you know—doesn’t have anything in her life together, certainly doesn’t have together how to rob a fast-food outlet. [They chuckle and confirm.] And so, this is her holding up the two people that work there—one of whom is sort of a younger lady, one of whom is a kind of—you know, like an old, retired guy. Semi-retired, I guess. [They chuckle.]
melissa
Semi-retired.
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Tammy: Don’t get sassy! Becky: Okay, sorry. Tammy: Okay!?! Becky: Yeah. Tammy: Just get pie. You want some pies? Larry: I like pie. Tammy: Well, get a pile for you, get a pile for—if you change your attitude, I’d like to give you some pies, on me. Becky: No, that’s okay, thanks. I don’t care for ‘em. Tammy: [Stammering] What did we just talk about?! I have a gun on you. I offered you pie. He likes pies. He’s got a gun to his face! Anything I say, he’s gonna like. I ask you; you want some pies?! Becky: I like pies. Tammy: Come onnn! That’s what I’m talking about! Alright, put a stack of pies for her, a stack of pies for me, and put— Becky: I think this is all of it.
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Tammy: Just get over there. Go—don’t walk right toward the gun! Becky: Sorry. Tammy: Put pies in there. Put ‘em in. Don’t creep up on me like that. Becky: Larry, seriously. Larry: You like apple? Tammy: I do like apple! But don’t make me—I don’t wanna have to choose between you. Becky: Choose Larry. Tammy: Larry, she’s telling me to take you out. Larry: I’m a veteran. Tammy: That’s amazing. Becky: Yeah.
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jesse
[Laughs.] Ben, this movie wasn’t one that you originally were going to direct, especially by yourself. [Ben confirms.] Were you scared to direct it?
ben
You know, I was nervous. I—you know, we had these conversations with kind of these amazing directors that just couldn’t do it because of scheduling. And then, you know, Melissa and I talked to Toby Emmerich, the head of New Line, and we just basically asked like—you know, we’d seen our friend Tate Taylor, who directed The Help, which I really loved as a movie. And then our friends Jim Rash and Nat Faxon directed The Way, Way Back—which, you know, I loved again. So, I just—almost by seeing my friends do it, I got more confident or at least Melissa and I started thinking, “Well—"
melissa
It’s possible.
ben
It’s possible. You know, that we’ve seen people do it that we know and respect and maybe we could do it. So, we asked Toby and he said, “You know, let me think about it.” And then he did, and he got back to us, and he said, “Do you wanna do it?” And then, you know, because of scheduling, Melissa really couldn’t do it. So, I—so, I did it.
jesse
We’ll finish up with Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy after a break. We’ll talk about what it was like working with Kathy Bates, the legend! It’s Bullseye, from MaximumFun.org and NPR.
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jesse
Welcome back to Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. If you’re just joining us, I’m talking with Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. They’ve been married since 2005. They’ve been collaborators in comedy for even longer. When I talked with them in 2014, they had just made their first movie: Tammy, which starred McCarthy and was directed by Falcone. Since then, they’ve gone on to make Life of the Party, Superintelligence, and the brand-new superhero comedy Thunder Force, which also stars Octavia Spencer. Let’s get back into our conversation. There’s a character in the movie played by Kathy Bates. And this is a movie with a totally amazing performance from Susan Sarandon, who plays—who plays the title character’s grandmother and is totally great. [They agree.] But Kathy Bates like steals the movie. And she plays a friend of the grandmother who’s partners with another character played by Sandra Oh and they kind of show up at their big, fancy mansion and they say, “Well, have you ever been to a lesbian Fourth of July party?” And, um—and they say no. And then this lesbian Fourth of July party is kind of the big—is the big centerpiece of the movie. [They confirm.] And—first of all, can you tell me if it was—to what extent it was an advised choice that it was—that it was a lesbian couple that you chose to be the people in this movie that are the kind of the people who have their feelings together? And also, how you ended up with these two people—Sandra Oh and Kathy Bates and what they brought to those characters?
melissa
You know, we—six years ago, when we started writing this, Lenore—in our hope of hopes—was always Kathy Bates. We wrote it for her. I don’t think either one of us actually thought she would ever see it or look at it or certainly do it. [Ben confirms.] But when we referred to it, sometimes we would say Lenore and sometimes we would say Kathy.
ben
Sometimes we called her Kathy, yeah.
melissa
And she was Kathy for a long time, ‘til we named her Lenore. And it was 100% in our brains that if we had some kind of sorcerer’s wand, Kathy Bates would do it.
ben
And as for the fact—you know, to make them a lesbian couple, I don’t know that, you know, we ever thought too much about it. We just wanted to create a couple that was, you know, sort of who—when Tammy’s, you know, going—learning, you know, and growing up, we wanted to sort of put people in there that are the people that Tammy could strive to be more like. And when we thought about a combination of, you know, Kathy Bates and Sandra Oh—I mean, that just seemed—they seemed like such graceful, great people and when they were portraying their relationship, the love was so evident and so great that I feel like, you know, it’s just one more element of Tammy growing up and saying, “Oh my gosh, like—I could—look at these two. They’re so happy. I could have that in my life if I would let that happen.” You know? So.
melissa
Yeah. Yeah, well, I don’t think we ever—I know we didn’t. I know we never really had the discussion why we were making, you know—making them lesbians. It just kind of—it just kind of organically came about.
jesse
There’s a—there’s a moment in the film where, without getting too specific, Kathy Bates kind of head-on addresses the conflict for Tammy, which is that she—you know, she has—she has, to that point, been kind of incapable of appreciating and supporting what she has. And, you know, one of the things she says is that it hasn’t—it hasn’t always been hip to be a lesbian.
crosstalk
Melissa: Yeah. Says it hasn’t been in fashion. Ben: Yeah, she says uh, “Gay hasn’t always been in fashion, my friend.”
ben
Which, you know actually Kathy improvised that. We—Kathy had done two takes on the dock and she was just—I just thought, you know, both of them—it was so nice. It really was one of those times of the movie that felt kind of really just so fun and special to watch. And Kathy had already done, you know, two takes. It’s the middle of the night and they were beautiful takes, and I was thinking, “Well, I think we’re about there.” And we had a guest writer there, my friend Damon Jones. And again, Rob Cowan was there and Chris Henchy—these really smart people—were there and they were like, “Ooh, we—um—” You know, ‘cause I’m just looking at a monitor on a dock and I’m thinking, “Great. We’re done.” And they said—they came up with the idea of, you know, saying like, “Couldn’t we go even a little farther of like, you know, not just, ‘You don’t do this; you’re so bad at this.’ You know, you could—” One of them said the line, “Do you think this house just fell on my head? Like, I had to work.” And that was all we really said. And then Kathy goes, “Ooh, ooh, ooh! I got it! Okay!” And so, we—you know—stopped, ‘cause she was kind of in a good spot. So, we just rolled the cameras and then that particular line you’re talking about, she improvised from that sort of idea.
melissa
Yeah, that’s one of my fave—I think in all the filming, it was all so fun and great, but there was something… I don’t know. Almost mystical about shooting that scene with her. She is—she is someone that, when she summons her powers, kind of rips through your chest. If you’re on the receiving end of it, I feel like it rips through your chest like a lightning bolt, and I felt it that night and it was—it was really pretty special. And there were a lot of the crew, after we shot that scene—you know, guys that have been doing this for 20, 30 years I saw come up to her and say, you know, “Thank you Ms. Bates for letting me kind of be a part of that.” And I think everybody just felt like we had just seen exactly why she’s Kathy Bates.
ben
Yeah, you got to see just such a great performer like at the top of their powers. You know. So, it was a—that was a really kind of a gratifying time. [Melissa agrees.]
jesse
It strikes me that the two of you are folks who have worked hard and, especially with success coming to you as like real, grownup adults, to be—to be grateful for the things that have come to you.
melissa
Oh my gosh. Yeah. [Ben confirms enthusiastically.] And I don’t think a minute, let alone—certainly not a day went by of the—of while we were shooting it and kind of every day since that we—you know, Ben and I haven’t kind of looked at each other and just said, you know, “Look at what is happening.” Like, “What—look what—who we’re standing here with and look what we’re getting to do.” I mean, you know, we worked for 20, 25 years to have, you know—to have a little shot at this. And so, to be able to—be able to make our own movie just is—it’s a dream.
ben
And it was a double-whammy because the people that we worked with were so, so nice. [Melissa agrees.] And that goes for, you know, the crew. They were all so great. And then the cast that we worked with—you know, because you hear good things about people and—but then, you know, from everybody there, you know—Gary and Mark and obviously Susan and Kathy—and you just have these amazing people. Allison Janney is a good friend of ours. You know, just to get a chance to work with these really nice people—I mean, it’s impossible not to feel grateful for that kind of experience. You know?
jesse
Well, I sure appreciate you guys taking the time to be on Bullseye. It was great to get to talk to you.
melissa
Oh, you too. Thanks for having us.
ben
Thanks. This was fun.
jesse
Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone from 2014. If you haven’t seen Tammy, their movie from way back then, it is funny and sweet—worth a watch. Their latest is Thunder Force. It also stars Octavia Spencer. You can stream it now, on Netflix.
music
Relaxed music with light vocalizations.
jesse
That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye is created from the homes of me and the staff of Maximum Fun, in and around greater Los Angeles, California—where Abel Arias sent his mom looking for that cassette tape [chuckling] of our interview with Blackalicious when we were 19. They couldn’t quite find it, but I’m grateful to him and Mrs. Arias for looking to find it. So. Thank you very much. Our show is produced by speaking into microphones. Our senior producer is Kevin Ferguson. Our producer is Jesus Ambrosio. Production fellows at Maximum Fun are Richard Robey and Valerie Moffat. We have help from Casey O’Brien. Our interstitial music is by Dan Wally, also known as DJW. Our theme song is by The Go! Team. Thanks very much to them and to their label, Memphis Industries, for sharing it. Their new record, Get up Sequences Part One, is out now. You can buy it on a sweet colored vinyl. You can get it on your digital platforms. You definitely should go grab it, ‘cause The Go! Team are just the jammingest, joyfulest thing in the world. You can keep up with our show on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where we post all our interview. And I think that’s about it. Just remember: all great radio hosts have a signature signoff.
promo
Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
About the show
Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.
Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.
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