We Had An Awkward Talk With Zac Efron And Adam DeVine About Comedy And Matt Damon
We may have accidentally offended them.
“If you want a selfie, you have to take it in your six minutes.”
Those are the parting words the publicist gives me as I step into a hotel room in Sydney. Like just about every other media organisation in the country, I have come to interview Zac Efron and Adam DeVine, the stars of goofy comedy Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. All of us have been given an interview slot that is exactly six minutes long, with mine set to start at 1.42pm sharp.
I spent a number of hours constructing a list of questions I hoped would both provoke insightful responses and subtly convince Zac Efron that I am the woman he is destined to marry: does he think he will one day have to break away from comedies to become a “serious actor”? Does he agree that his body is shown in movies the way female bodies typically are, with gratuitous and lingering shots? Did he take the role in Bad Neighbours 2 because of its feminist undertones?
I plan to come away with a piece that explores how Zac Efron is part of a new breed of movie stars, like The Rock or Channing Tatum, who isn’t afraid to make fun of himself, and how he has real star quality but sometimes picks bad movies. I will write a little bit about his eyes, which are a piercing green and not the blue they sometimes look on screen, without going full Vanity Fair. I will include a few lines about Adam DeVine so he doesn’t feel left out. It’s a nice plan. But six minutes, it turns out, is not very much time to do an interview.
I walk into the room and shake hands with both actors. “I don’t know if you are meant to shake hands in these things, but I’m going for it,” I joke, wasting precious time. I fiddle around placing my handbag on the floor in a spot I hope is not in the shot, wasting more time. By this time, I have probably wasted a whole minute without realising it.
“Adam I know you’ve always been a comedian but Zac, you’ve only moved into making comedies more recently-”
“Yeah, I wasn’t funny until recently,” Efron answers.
“Until a few years ago,” DeVine interjects. “Well I got really serious recently, so I’m going to go down that road.”
“Adam is at the point where he is almost too funny.”
“Yeah, watch how serious I can be,” DeVine says, pulling a Blue Steel-style expression that I do not know how to react to.
This is the expression.
This double act goes on for two whole minutes. Efron and DeVine are professionals who know they are there to perform, who are in the middle of what is probably a very monotonous press tour where they are asked the same questions over and over, and who are not at all to blame for my shitty interview. When they look over at me, they can probably see my face contorted in a mix of horror and anxiety. I want to tell them that they can relax because I am a writer and that despite the fact that all interviews are filmed, I do not plan to use this video footage anywhere. But that will take up more time, so I push on.
“Do you have be willing to embarrass yourself to be good at comedy?”
“People are having careers where they are funny people and then they go off and do dramas and they’re the funny person in that drama, which I think is cool,” DeVine says. “Like Matt Damon,” Efron chimes in. “He’s such a great actor, he’s so versatile. But then in The Martian he is so funny, he carries that entire film in a very funny way… I don’t know what tangent I’m going on, I just like Matt Damon. I heard he’s here, in this hotel.”
Just as I am wondering how I going to rescue this interview from the infiltration of Matt Damon, a film operator sitting to my left raises one finger at me. “Does that mean I only have one minute left?” I ask, breaking the fourth wall and proving to everyone in the room that I am an idiot. He nods.
“Oh god, oh god,” I say out loud. I flub out a question about their co-stars, Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick, who were the best part of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. The movie’s plot centres on Efron and DeVine’s titular characters, who are instructed by their parents to bring dates to their sister’s wedding to keep them from causing trouble and ruining the day, something they have a history of. They hunt for two “good girls” to bring to the wedding and land on Plaza and Kendrick, who turn out to be weed-smoking, porn-watching party animals. And so the jokes begin.
Then remembering the publicist’s word of warning, I ask for a photo. Only not even this goes according to plan, because I am wearing heels and DeVine and Efron are both at the petite end of the height spectrum. So when I go to stand between them, I am immediately taller and crouch down to meet their height without meaning to. As soon as I begin this crouch I realise I have done something terribly emasculating and try to correct myself, but it is too late, the damage has been done and Zac will never ask for my hand in marriage. At this point it’s clear that it is time for me to leave.
“Hopefully you got something usable in there,” DeVine says to me on the way out.
Well, it’s the thought that counts.
–
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is out now.
Katie Cunningham is the Editor of inthemix.