By Gill Pringle and Anthony Frajman
Jeremy, we heard about you breaking your arm during production, can tell us about it?
Jeremy Renner: A stunt gone wrong, fell 20 feet, was not a good start to the movie for me. But we overcame it.
Jon Hamm: He’s playing it very coy. It could have been much worse obviously. The ability of Mr. Renner here to fight through what was surely excruciating pain, to keep the movie moving forward and on schedule, was wildly impressive. And, inspirational to the rest of the cast as well. When you have a leader like that, that is able to literally take one for the team…
Ed Helms: I was very annoyed. When somebody gets injured badly, and then they’re back on set hours later, and just cranking, it makes it very hard for the rest of us to complain about things… because I like to complain about things sometimes… They could be legitimate things to complain about you know, but Jeremy’s got two broken arms.
Are many of you in touch with old school friends in real life?
EH: Well, we shot this movie in Atlanta, which is my hometown. I saw a lot of my childhood friends. I went to the same school for first grade to 12th grade. I knew a lot of those kids very well. And I’m still friends with a lot of them. We hung out with Jon, I played golf a couple times with my buddies. And, and so yeah, still in touch.
JH: I’ve got a very close group of friends with five or six of us that all went to school. We’ve known each other since we were 12. And that’s like a pretty big developmental shift from adolescence, to teenage, adult, and now we’re all in our 40s. Some of us are married, divorced kids, no kids, whatever it is, but I’ll go back to St. Louis, come back for whatever holiday or playoff game or something fun and just like, immediately go right back to being 18 again, and just fall right back into the same patterns and hierarchies. I recognise that when I was hanging out with Ed’s friends, I was like, ‘Oh, I get this energy, it’s so comfortable. So much in Hollywood and celebrity and all this stuff is uncomfortable, because it doesn’t fit on you or you’re shoved into a weird shape that you don’t want to be. Or there’s a perception of you that’s completely inaccurate, driven by the media, driven by whatever. And then when you go home, where you go with your friends who know you, that all goes away. It’s just comfortable.
JR: I have a group of friends, but I was in a different school every year in the same town, in my grade school, high school on. I don’t see them much… I’m not really a good communicator… I have a giant family, so it’s hard enough just to talk to them. I talk to one person, they pass it on to everyone else. I’m on a text chain, have been for decades, we all communicate to where we are in the world or kids, sports, when we get a tattoo, that kind of stuff.
Because you guys are movie stars, are you friends shy with you?
EH: No way. Not the people that knew you for 40 years. They’ve curios about the job. But it’s the people that know how much of a dork you really are. Those are the people that keep you humble.
Jon, how did you find being in a comedy?
JH: I’m very comfortable with comedy. It’s kind of what I was raised on. I was raised by a single mom, I don’t have any siblings, I do have sisters, but they’re much older than me, and weren’t in my mom’s house when I grew up. So, I was kind of alone a lot, and in a pre-internet era, pre-cable TV era, the place you got all of your stuff was in a library. I would check out comedy albums. And it was George Carlin and Bill Cosby. Bob Newhart. All of these things. It was funny, and it was smart, it was adult, and I felt like I’m learning something. Mad Men was a funny show, too. Matt [Weiner] is a comedy writer at heart, so it was always fun to get that, but I feel particularly lucky to have kind of credibility on both sides of the aisle. I owe that to people like Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels, who tapped me to host SNL or be in 30 Rock, or whatever it is. Kristen [Wiig] cast me in Bridesmaids. I love doing it, and Jeremy was saying earlier that it’s a better when you lay your head down at the end of the night coming off of a comedy set than it is drama usually. Because you’re like ‘that was fun day, I had a bunch of laughs’. And drama, you’re just beating yourself up. ‘Is it right? Is it wrong? Was I good?’
Jeremy, was it refreshing to do this movie after Avengers?
JR: The last thing I did was Wind River which is very small movie, didn’t take very long to shoot. But it’s very, very intense. Tag is also a very intimate movie. But then when there was action stuff, it’s intimate, and that’s refreshing. And the content of it for me is, even comedies, I like the intimacy of it. It feels like there’s a team. And big movies, it’s hard to feel like there’s a team, there’s so many people. Even when we finished shooting Avengers, there’s a whole other side of it. They have to create the world that wouldn’t exist without so much CGI, and I have no idea what it will look like. So, it’s not connected, right? This and Wind River are character driven, and that’s what I love, and there’s more to do.
Tag is in cinemas from June 14, 2018. Read our review here.
