It takes some nerve to make a movie called “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” and then build the entire thing around a Kansas hairstylist who is whisked away by a tornado of chaos to Los Angeles to get it on with Jon Hamm. Thankfully, David Wain (“Wet Hot American Summer,” “Role Models”) and Ken Marino (“Wanderlust,” “Children’s Hospital”) have never seemed particularly burdened by good sense.
Directed by Wain and co-written by Wain and Marino, the comedy stars Zoey Deutch as Gail Daughtry, a relentlessly sunny woman whose fiancé cashes in his celebrity sex pass by sleeping with… well, someone you will be delighted to see. Gail does the only reasonable thing and heads west to track down and screw the brains out of her own celebrity pick, Jon Hamm. Along the way, the film turns into a warped “Wizard of Oz” homage populated by insecure actors, Hollywood weirdos, and celebrities willing to debase themselves for a good joke and a cameo.
Ken Marino, John Slattery, Ben Wang, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Richard Kind, and Jon Hamm co-star. The film opens in theaters on July 10.
The Playlist spoke with Deutch, Wain, and Marino about how to get this thing made, asking Hamm to star in a movie about people desperately trying to have sex with him, and the possibility of returning to Camp Firewood with another “Wet Hot” project.
The movie feels a little like someone tossed “The Wizard of Oz,” a Hallmark romance, and a celebrity hall-pass joke into a dryer and waited to see what came out. Marino claimed that was more or less the actual writing process.
“We write all those different themes and ideas, and we put them on pieces of paper,” he said. “We throw them in a little bowl and pull out the first three. Then we’re like, ‘Let’s write that.’”
The less amusing truth is that they pitched the movie around town and didn’t hear much enthusiasm.
“We pitched it to plenty of places that said no,” Wain said. “We had to write and hone the script. I think that’s what ultimately got producers and then actors on board because the script written out spoke for itself more than us trying to say, ‘Trust us, this would work.’”
Deutch, meanwhile, could not understand what the problem was.
“Every time I read it and sought this out, I was like, ‘Please, can I be a part of this?’” she said. “Every time I pitched this to people, they were like, ‘That is the best idea I’ve ever heard. How has this movie not been made?’”
Then she looked at Wain and offered another theory: “Maybe you did a bad job pitching.”
The entire movie depends on Hamm being game enough to play Jon Hamm as the ultimate celebrity sex pass. Luckily, Wain and Marino already knew him, and the part was never exactly a secret. The movie’s working title was “I’ll Take the Hamm.”
“I think I called him on the phone and said, ‘I’m going to send you something. It’s about you, and hopefully you’ll like it,” Wain recalled. “He liked it immediately, and so did Slattery. Basically, everyone we asked was just like, ‘Sure, this sounds funny. Let’s do it.’”
Aniston was a bigger swing. Her role had not originally been written specifically for her, but the filmmakers eventually realized that the joke needed someone who felt enormous.
“We were like, ‘You know who would be great? Jennifer Aniston,” Wain said. “Then we were like, ‘Well, actually, let’s call her up and see if she’ll do it.’ We had some debate about whether we should even ask because it seemed like such a long shot. Then we called her, and she was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be fun. Let’s do it.’”
For Deutch, the day became less about acting and more about trying not to stare at Jennifer Aniston.
“That was one of the coolest days of my life,” she said. “I was the worst actor I’ve ever been because I just sat as an audience member. It’s incredible when you see someone who’s the greatest. She has a thing. Every take was so fucking funny, and she’s such a lovely person and such a star.”
At one point, Gail comments on how good Aniston smells. According to Deutch, there was no acting involved there either.
“That was not improv,” she said. “Like I said, I was not acting. That was Zoey.”
Slattery may take an even greater beating. The film treats one of the busiest and coolest actors around as a desperate has-been who has not worked in years, and that is before the physical humiliation starts.
“He responded immediately to the script,” Wain said. “I think he got the joke and thought it was funny. This notion that one of the hardest, most often-working actors in the business is portrayed as someone who hasn’t had a job in ten years, and that he’s got a pretty hardcore way of hitting on someone early on, is just really funny.”
Deutch thinks Slattery can survive all of it because he carries himself as a man who knows none of this could possibly make him less cool.
“He has the most swagger of any actor I’ve ever met,” she said. “Slattery is just full swagger. He’s an incredibly cool human being. When you’re that cool and you know you’re that cool, you can be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll make fun of myself.’”
Deutch, who has been on a roll with three movies coming out in the past month, also came into an already established comedy partnership here. Wain and Marino have been working together for decades, from “Wet Hot American Summer” and “The State” to “Role Models,” “Wanderlust,” and “They Came Together.” Their comedy has its own peculiar wavelength, and Deutch did not assume her executive producer credit meant she should come in and start moving the furniture.
“I was just trying not to mess up and trying to learn as much as I could from them because their world is so specific and different,” she said. “I’ve done a lot of comedy, but they’ve created their own language.”
The film also deliberately has the bright, slightly cheap look of the made-for-TV romances it is sending up. Or, at least, that is the official explanation.
“We were spoofing the idea of low-budget,” Wain said.
“We had a low budget to look low-budget.”
Marino offered the more diplomatic answer: “Different people pull different things from it. If that’s what you saw, yes, of course, that’s what we were doing.”
The movie certainly feels built for the same sort of cult life that found its way into “Wet Hot American Summer” and “They Came Together.” Those projects did not need to become enormous mainstream hits to stick around. People kept finding them, quoting them, and handing them to the next person. Wain knows how rare that is.
“We’ve gotten the chance to make these kinds of movies that are very personal comedies in a way,” he said. “The fact that we got to do it multiple times is incredible. And the fact that people respond to them, sometimes slowly over time, sometimes not, has been a true gift.”
With “Wet Hot American Summer” celebrating its 25th anniversary, Wain was also asked whether the Camp Firewood universe had finally reached its end. While the Netflix series “Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later” did leave the story in a fairly definitive place, he would not completely shut the door on doing more.
“Never say never,” Wain said.
Marino already knows how to reopen it: an animated children’s series in the spirit of “Muppet Babies,” except with infant versions of the Camp Firewood characters.
“Wet Hot Babies,” he suggested.
That was quickly shortened to “Wet Babies,” a title likely to create several problems before anyone gets around to animating it.
Wain still believes in the idea.
“When I was born, I was wet,” he said. “We all were. It’s a universal thing. Everybody’s going to connect to it.”
Watch the full conversation with Zoey Deutch, David Wain, and Ken Marino below.
