Henstridge reunites with her "The Whole Nine Yards" co-stars including Bruce Willis, Matthew Perry, and Amanda Peet, for "The Whole Ten Yards," Henstridge plays an integral role in the sequel's who's conning who storyline. Kevin Pollak also returns for another round as a mob guy, but this time he plays the father of his "The Whole Nine Yards" villain.
INTERVIEW WITH NATASHA HENSTRIDGE AND KEVIN POLLAK:
Is this the first time you’ve played the father of one
of your own characters?
KEVIN POLLAK: Yeah, that’s the first. In fact, when Bruce Willis
called me eight months before we started shooting just
to say, “I just read a script. It looks like we might
do the sequel to ‘The Whole Nine Yards.’” I said, “Well, thanks for the heads up. Have a great time. Well, you know I died in the first one, Bruce.” [He said,] “No, no,
you’re coming back as your old man.” You think I aged
that much? It’s only been two years. So yeah, I was
pretty excited, and I’ve been doing stand-up comedy
for 26 years, and several comedy films, but
this is the funniest thing I’ve ever done.
Was the voice modeled on anyone you knew?
KEVIN POLLAK: No, but once I found the voice, I didn’t mind putting
on the make-up.
How has the stand-up world changed?
KEVIN POLLAK: In 17 different ways, really. You know I
stopped doing it for like 10 years, until about a
year ago, and then I got really excited and put
together a new act and started touring again.
So what do you talk about in your stand-up?
KEVIN POLLAK: Well, really just people when I meet them want to
know what it’s like to work with all of these
incredible people that I am fortunate enough to work
with in film. And I always did impersonations in my
stand-up act, so I was able to tell stories and also
work in the impersonations like when my mom came to
visit me on the set of ‘A Few Good Men’ and ended
up hitting on Jack Nicholson. Like that’s [not] horrifying
enough.
How much of this movie was improvisation and how much
was written?
KEVIN POLLAK: A lot of it was on the page…
NATHASHA HENSTRIDGE: There were a lot of rewrites. I’m not an improv master by any stretch of the imagination, so I was like, “Please, you guys figure it out, write it down, and I’ll say it, okay?”
Who did the rewrites?
KEVIN POLLAK: The truth is we, there was a lot of work done
before we started shooting, because we did so much
rewriting on the first one, a lot of it comes from
Matthew Perry. He is by far one of the most
instinctually funny people I’ve ever worked with in
my life. I think [it’s from] working on the TV show for so
long. The way those shows work is on the week of
rehearsal, after reading the script, they’re
constantly trying to do what they call ‘beat the
joke.’ So they’ll have the jokes in the script that
they’ll rehearse and then they’ll get tired of them
real fast and then they’ll try to beat them, and try
to top them. All through rehearsal, the actors as well
as the writers are always trying to beat the joke.
I noticed on “The Whole Nine Yards,” some of the lines that are quoted back to me on the street, like the three or four favorites, are lines that Matthew [came up with]. After they said, “Action,’ he leaned over and said, “Say ‘don’t blong,” I say don’t blong. What? Don’t be long.” That happened so much on the first one that we decided to spend a little time with the writer to kind of work it out before we started shooting, but then once we started shooting, the same thing happened.
Is it difficult to keep a structure for the film when
you’re improvising so much?
KEVIN POLLAK: Plot-wise, you get into a little trouble.
NATASHA HENSTRIDGE: Yeah, that’s what starts to happen a little bit, I think. You start changing little things, and it’s that thread of the movie, the through-line, and somewhere you’re like trying to figure it out and make sure you still have that. So there were issues - not issues - but we had to make sure we were careful about that in the process of trying to make the movie funnier.
Do you need to have seen the first movie to get the relationships
in this one?
KEVIN POLLAK: Um, yes and no.
NATASHA HENSTRIDGE: It’s always great with a sequel to see the first one, but you don’t have to. The movie is so funny. I mean, it’s obviously a movie, it’s got a story and all that stuff, but what’s funny about movies like this in my opinion are scene by scene funny stuff that happens in the scene.
KEVIN P0LLAK: Silliness and odd behavior. I think there’s a built-in fan base from the first one that looks forward to continuing the story with these characters. We kind of made sure in the process of rewriting that if you’d never seen the first one, you could still jump in and there was enough exposition being laid out.
PAGE 2: "Whole Ten Yards" Anecdotes, Motherhood and Upcoming Projects
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry Interview
"The Whole Ten Yards" Photos and Trailer
