David Arquette has been at this a long time – where are my fellow millennials? And while Arquette has been in countless funny films, his recent movie The Good Half deals with more somber tones than we’re used to seeing in David Arquette movies. In a recent interview with KJ from the KJ Today Show and Kinda Nerdy Girls, Arquette talks about playing the comic relief in a movie about loss.
See an excerpt below:
KJ: All right. So we are talking with David Arquette and the movie that we’re here to talk about. I am just so intrigued with this for so many reasons. It is called The Good Half. And what a cast. You, David, Nick Jonas, Brittany Snow, Matt Walsh, Elizabeth Shue. I mean, it just goes on and on. Alexandra Shipp. Can you talk, first off, what it was like to be able to kind of, it sounds like you’re a bit of the comedic relief here in this movie that is kind of surrounded by some more difficult topics like death and planning funerals.
DAVID: Yeah, it is. It is. I am. I’m sort of the cringe-worthy comedic, I’m the stepfather named Rick. And Nick Jonas’ character, Wren, comes back to Cleveland, his hometown, and unfortunately, he has to bury his mother and his sisters, played by Brittany Snow. But I don’t really, as their stepfather, I don’t really take their feelings into consideration too much when planning it. So it leads to some uncomfortable moments. And yeah, Rick was a funny character to play because he’s like this narcissistic character. So I’d have all these moments where we’d ad-lib something and I, in my head, would think, oh, that’s funny. But I would think, oh, my character wouldn’t think that’s funny. He’d be annoyed by it. So I’d have these reactions that weren’t my natural instinct.
KJ: I mean, was it difficult for you there in Hollywood to find inspiration playing a narcissist?
DAVID: No, absolutely not. I was always fascinated by narcissism. And you have to have a certain amount of it just to be an actor. I mean, in general, just to have the confidence to stand up in front of camera or in front of an audience and sort of own the performance. So you have to balance it. But in Hollywood, there tends to be a ton of them. And some of them don’t understand the balance element of it. So I was obsessed so much that I once mentioned to a therapist, I was like, I’m really interested in narcissism and narcissist. Do you have any narcissistic clients? And he said, no. Do you want to know why? I said, why? And he said, they don’t need me. That really told me everything I needed to know about narcissism.
KJ: So in dealing with family dynamics, I’ve been doing this a long time. And a lot of my followers were with me, actually, when my parents were passing away. And I made a lot of jokes on the air about the process you go through in planning a funeral I think if you’re not laughing about it, I don’t know how you get through it. Did you find when you were creating this film that there was, I mean, there has to be a balance of like, this is serious, we’re dealing with death, but also sometimes this is just utterly ridiculous and you had to kind of portray a little bit of both, right?
DAVID: Absolutely. I lost both my parents too and that whole process is just so heart-wrenching, but there is a lot of humor in it. I mean even the awkwardness of someone saying are you doing when it’s like the worst day of your life? I mean those moments happen all the time and it also triggers like the extremes and everyone’s personality if someone’s a controller then they want to just control everything. It’s the most uncontrollable situation ever so it peaks everyone’s sort of trigger points and you kind of have to find these ways of laughing at it. But the director, Robert Schwartzman, has a really wonderful way of balancing it. It was written by a guy named Ben who took from his own personal experience of losing his mother and sort of noted down all of these moments and having to deal with his stepfather and all this stuff. So I think it was really cathartic for him to sort of experience that and write it down and have this film made. and sort of go through that process.
For the full interview, be sure to check it out on The KJ Today Show:
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