Alan Cumming is 'sure there's going to be a dance number' in 'Romy and Michele' sequel: 'There's got to be'
Alan Cumming isn't going to miss out on the next reunion.
The Traitors host will join Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino in the long-awaited sequel to Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, he confirmed to Yahoo Entertainment. He played Sandy Frink in the 1997 cult classic.
Cumming played coy at first when asked if he could tease the premise of the forthcoming film. "It's not allowed," he told Yahoo on Feb. 8 at the AARP's Movies for Grownups Awards, which he hosted. "It's actually not allowed."
However, Cumming — who said production will likely begin this summer — confirmed he's spoken with Kudrow.
"We were actually having a chat about Sandy, they're going to do some rewrites on Sandy, which I think are great," Cumming continued. "I loved it. Then they had some other ideas and I talked to her and was like, 'Ooh, I like that even more.'"
When asked if the sequel will feature another dance number with Sorvino and Kudrow, Cumming seemed more than hopeful.
"I'm sure there's going to be a dance number, there's got to be. I mean, it's so funny that it's so iconic, that [scene]," he said.
Cumming's character, Sandy, was a geek in high school who shows up at the reunion as a very wealthy and successful businessman. He was always in love with Michele, but the standout scene at the end of the film involved all three characters.
"I did a thing the other day for Vanity Fair. You know, when you look at your old films and you talk about them, and I remember that we got nominated for an [MTV Movie Award for] Best Dance Sequence. We didn't win, we were robbed," the actor said.
Cumming recalled how in the original script, there was just one sentence: "That Sandy, Romy and Michele do a modern interpretive dance."
"My god, we rehearsed for ages," Cumming said, adding that they all worked with a choreographer. "It was not ad-libbed."
On Jan. 29, the Hollywood Reporter confirmed that Sorvino and Kudrow were in final negotiations to star in the sequel along with many involved in the original. The actresses will also serve as executive producers. Tim Federle will direct, and Robin Schiff, who wrote the original screenplay, is writing the sequel.
When Yahoo talked with Kudrow in December, she appeared to hint at the possibility of a sequel. We asked if she had done any projects, like Romy & Michele, that she wouldn't want to be revived or rebooted.
"I think it's OK," the Friends star said at the time. "Reboot whatever you want."
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Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
'I Don't Understand You': Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells movie inspired by adoption fraud story from filmmakers
While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point. In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child. But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos. As Craig and Crano identified, the first portion of the movie, up until the couple gets stuck going to the restaurant, is quite close to the real experience the filmmakers had. "We were adopting a child. We had been through an adoption scam, which was heartbreaking, and then had a completely different experience when we matched with the birth mother of our son," Crano told Yahoo. "But we found out that we were going to have him literally like two days before we were going on our 10th anniversary trip." "And we were like, 'Shit, should we not go?' But we decided to do it, and you're so emotionally opened up and vulnerable in that moment that it felt like a very similar experience to being in a horror movie, even though it's a joyful kind of situation." A key element of I Don't Understand You is that feeling of shock once the story turns from a romance-comedy to something much bloodier. It feels abrupt, but it's that jolt of the contrast that also makes that moment feel particularly impactful to watch. "Our sense of filmmaking is so ... based on surprise," Craig said. "As a cinephile, my main decade to go to are outlandish '90s movies, because they just take you to a different space, and as long as you have a reality to the characters that are already at hand, you can kind of take them wherever." "Personally, the situation of adoption was a constant jolt [from] one emotion to another that we felt like that was the right way to tell a story like this, which was literally, fall in love with a couple and then send them into a complete nightmare. And I think you can only get that if you do it abruptly, and kind of manically." While Rannells and Kroll have that funny and sweet chemistry the story needs, these were roles that weren't written for them. But it works because Crano and Craig know how to write in each other's voices so well, that's where a lot of the dialogue is pulled from. Additionally, the filmmakers had the "creative trust" in each other to pitch any idea, as random as it may have seemed, to see if it could work for the film. "When you're with somebody you've lived with for 15 years, there is very little that I can do that would embarrass me in front of David," Crano said. "So that level of creative freedom is very generative." "We were able to screw up in front of each other a lot without it affecting the rest of our day," Craig added. Of course, with the language barrier between the filmmakers and the Italian cast, it was a real collaboration to help make the script feel authentic for those characters. "All of the Italian actors and crew were very helpful in terms of being like, 'Well I feel like my character is from the south and wouldn't say it in this way.' And helped us build the language," Crano said. "And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distant job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking." For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college. "The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'" That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix. "I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' And after about five of those Peter was like, 'You're going to direct it. We'll make some shorts. We'll see if you can do it.' He just sort of saw it," Crano recalled. "It's nice to be seen in any capacity for your ability, but [I started to realize] this is not so different from writing, it's just sort of writing and physical space and storytelling, and I love to do it. ... It is a very difficult job, because it requires so much money to test the theory, to even see if you can." But being able to work together on I Don't Understand You, the couple were able to learn things about and from each other through the filmmaking process. "David is lovely to everyone," Crano said. "He is much nicer than I am at a sort of base level, and makes everyone feel that they can perform at the best of their ability. And that's a really good lesson." "Brian literally doesn't take anything personally," Craig added. "Almost to a fault." "And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Yahoo
'I Don't Understand You': Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells movie based on adoption fraud story from filmmakers
While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point. In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child. But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos. As Craig and Crano identified, the first portion of the movie, up until the couple gets stuck going to the restaurant, is quite close to the real adoption experience the filmmakers had. "We were adopting a child. We had been through an adoption scam, which was heartbreaking, and then had a completely different experience when we matched with the birth mother of our son," Crano told Yahoo. "But we found out that we were going to have him literally like two days before we were going on our 10th anniversary trip." "And we were like, 'Shit, should we not go?' But we decided to do it, and you're so emotionally opened up and vulnerable in that moment that it felt like a very similar experience to being in a horror movie, even though it's a joyful kind of situation." A key element of I Don't Understand You is that feeling of shock once the story turns from a romance-comedy to something much bloodier. It feels abrupt, but it's that jolt of the contrast that also makes that moment feel particularly impactful to watch. "Our sense of filmmaker is so much based on surprise, Craig said. "As a cinephile, my main decade to go to are outlandish '90s movies, because they just take you to a different space, and as long as you have a reality to the characters that are already at hand, you can kind of take them wherever." "Personally, the situation of adoption was a constant jolt [from] one emotion to another that we felt like that was the right way to tell a story like this, which was literally, fall in love with a couple and then send them into a complete nightmare. And I think you can only get that way if you do it abruptly, and kind of manically." While Rannells and Kroll have that funny and sweet chemistry the story needs, these were roles that weren't written for them. But it works because Crano and Craig know how to write in each other's voices so well, that's where a lot of the dialogue is pulled from. Additionally, the filmmakers had the "creative trust" in each other to pitch any idea, as random as it may have seemed, to see if it could work for the film. "When you're with somebody you've lived with for 15 years, there is very little that I can do that would embarrass me in front of David," Crano said. "So that level of creative freedom is very generative." "We were able to screw up in front of each other a lot without it affecting the rest of our day," Craig added. Of course, with the language barrier between the filmmakers and the Italian cast, it was a real collaboration to help make the script feel authentic for those characters. "All of the Italian actors and crew were very helpful in terms of being like, 'Well I feel like my character is is from the south and wouldn't say it in this way.' And helped us build the language," Crano said. "And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distang job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking." For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college. "The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'" That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix. "I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' And after about five of those Peter was like, 'You're going to direct it. We'll make some shorts. We'll see if you can do it.' He just sort of saw it," Crano recalled. "It's nice to be seen in any capacity for your ability, but [I started to realize] this is not so different from writing, it's just sort of writing and physical space and storytelling, and I love to do it. ... It is a very difficult job, because it requires so much money to test the theory, to even see if you can." But being able to work together on I Don't Understand You, the couple were able to learn things about and from each other through the filmmaking process. "David is lovely to everyone," Crano said. "He is much nicer than I am at a sort of base level, and makes everyone feel that they can perform at the best of their ability. And that's a really good lesson." "Brian literally doesn't take anything personally," Craig added. "Almost to a fault." "And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Does 'John Wick 5' Come Next After 'Ballerina'?
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." THE franchise is going strong. Now spanning five movies and a TV series (and counting), it's clear that this is not only a violent, unique, and action-packed world, but one with just about endless possibilities. In fact, the latest film, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (or, as we'll refer to it to avoid that clunky title, Ballerina) is proof that the franchise can explore new ground and succeed even without the titular Mr. Wick himself. Sure, Keanu Reeves is in the movie, but the main character is Ana de Armas's Eve—and watching her kick ass in a Wick-esque manner should fill any Keanu-size holes in your heart in the meantime. It's clear that the Wick franchise will continue from here—it's just unknown in what direction. This is a series and brand that's now been making Lionsgate lots of money for over a decade, and with multiple recognizable stars in the fold, there are a bunch of ways things could go. For example, we know that we could do another John Wick movie, and now it seems more than possible that we could do another Ballerina movie. But there's also a spinoff film coming on the John Wick: Chapter 4 character Caine, played by Donnie Yen, which will also star Rina Sawayama's Akira (Yen will also direct). We've already gone down the road of a prequel; the little-watched limited series The Continental focused on the exploits of a younger Winston (Ian McShane). So that's probably not a road that will particularly be gone down, though Wick director Chad Stahelski and McShane don't think particularly highly of it. So maybe don't rule out some kind of re-do. Again: the possibilities do feel kind of endless. But we know the primary question that everyone is going to be asking after Ballerina—will we be getting John Wick 5? And at this time we do seem to have a pretty definitive answer. From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is set between the events of John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4. It picks up the character of "The Director," played by Angelica Huston, who was introduced in Chapter 3, and, perhaps most notably, includes Keanu Reeves as played by John Wick. This is the key part of the equation, considering John Wick dies at the end of Chapter 4. That would seem to signify a closed book, right? But as we've established, the possibilities in this world are pretty endless. Most likely. Despite the titular character's death at the end of John Wick: Chapter 4, Lionsgate officially announced that John Wick 5 was in the works at this year's CinemaCon back in April. That being said, director Chad Stahelski is still a little apprehensive that the film will actually get made—because he wants to make sure it's as good as it can possibly be. "Look, everybody seems to want it," he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "It's a matter of whether we crack it. We're actively working on it. It's just … is it going to be satisfying?" Throughout the conversation Stahelski repeatedly suggested that while they're early in the process on John Wick 5, it's still just that—early in the process. And that he hasn't even officially brought the idea to Reeves yet. Stahelski is meticulous, and holds himself to a high standard. And so he doesn't want to proceed with something until it's actually ready to proceed. "If we go down the road of John Wick 5 and build this story and decide this isn't right, there are probably going to be 10 other things we'll discover that we'll use for other things," he says. Which implies it still could not happen. But, he says, sooner or later, it probably will. "The studio would very much will it into existence, I'm sure, at some point," he says. "Look, they've been great and they've asked us to really try and we have a really good couple of ideas and we're going to try." But still, they are very early on. And it seems like for now the Caine spinoff, which has Donnie Yen attached to star and direct, Rina Sawayama attached to reprise her Akira character, and Mattson Tomlin attached to write, is much further along in production, and will certainly come first. Now that much truly remains to be seen. But it would feel like kind of a missed opportunity if it didn't, right? Keanu Reeves and Ana de Armas are both bona fide movie stars, and scenes between the two of them are action magic. Let's say Wick 5 opens up with John Wick fighting his way up from hell. Might be a little tricky for him to meet up with Eve down there, but once he gets back to the surface, it feels like a pretty good bet that we'll see these two together (and with guns at each other's throats) again. Shop Now Shop Now You Might Also Like The Best Hair Growth Shampoos for Men to Buy Now 25 Vegetables That Are Surprising Sources of Protein
