By Erin Free
“I love to improvise off a really great, structured script,” Melissa McCarthy once told FilmInk. “I don’t like it when you’re supposed to fix it or find it; that’s not how I improvise, because then you’re just running amok. I love it when everything’s there, and then you can just change the noun or change the adjective. Then it becomes really fun because you have a great base. It’s the only way that it works.”
That method inspired comedy gold with 2011’s Bridesmaids, an estrogen-heavy gut-buster that proved to any idiot thinking otherwise that women can, indeed, be very, very, very funny. “All the girls in Bridesmaids are from famous improv groups here in the US…and then there’s me,” Australian actress, Rose Byrne, laughed to FilmInk on the movie’s ad lib-filled set. With a punchy base script by star and Saturday Night Live comedy queen, Kristen Wiig, and her writing partner, Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids offered the perfect playground for its improv-ready cast. Though filled with funny ladies, it was Melissa McCarthy who proved to be the film’s breakout, scene stealing star. While honing her skills as a standup comedian at New York’s The Improv, she languished in tiny roles, before earning her first break in 2000 on TV’s Gilmore Girls. When that show was cancelled, McCarthy became a regular on Christine Applegate’s Samantha Who, before landing her own TV comedy series in 2010 as one half of Mike & Molly.
But Bridesmaids was the real fire starter. As Megan, the big talking, no-nonsense sister of the groom – who doesn’t quite click with the rest of the bridal party – McCarthy is outrageous but also wonderfully warm. Whether she’s talking about climbing a man “like a tree”, putting the moves on a hapless Air Marshall, not being able to discern “which end that came out of” during a brutal bout of gastro, or fearing that she’s “over-committed” by taking home nine free puppies, Megan is like a female John Belushi, but without the brutishness. She’s also one of the film’s most real and relatable characters. “I’m life, Annie,” she memorably howls to Kristen Wiig’s uptight leading character, “and I’m biting you in the ass!” And a whole bunch of it was Melissa McCarthy herself. “The lines were coming to her so quickly,” Kristen Wiig told GQ. “I don’t even think she really thought about, ‘How is this sounding? What do I look like?’ She just became Megan.”
