Hey kids, we had a fun sit down with the stars of the new comedy, I Love You, Man.  The adorable quartet of Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones and Jaime Pressly chatted about boyfriends, girlfriends, manfriends, locker room talk, make-up sex and the strange and timeless allure of Rush.

Dig it.

I Love You, Man

Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones & Jaime Pressly

The Lady Miz Diva:  Jaime, you and Jon Favreau have some scary chemistry going on, can you tell us how you guys worked out your characters?

Jaime Pressly:  Well, he had done {My Name is} Earl.  He had done our show before, so I had gotten to work with him on the show, but I also knew him and Vince {Vaughn} through other things, but I’d never been able to spend this much time with him.  And the day started out like, ‘300 million? Really?’  Cos it was a Monday and Friday the 3 days before is when Iron Man came out and I was like, “Really, you got 300 million now. I guess you can direct me now?”  And we were laughing and talking about it and how we wanted to be, and he said, “Do you think they really hate each other and that’s why they argue?’  And I went, “No, I think they love each other madly.  I think it’s passion, but I think they both wanna wear the pants.  They both wanna be the boss and they’re both really strong minded individuals.  I think she is such a strong individual, he needs to constantly show her that he’s the boss.  But, I think at the end of the day, they just love having make-up sex.”  And he said, “Okay, all right, let’s do this.”  And so every take we did was different, and he’s so amazing at improv that he keeps you on your toes and it was always so quick.  A lot of the film is improv with everybody and that’s what made it so much more fun.

LMD:  I Love You, Man has a surprising amount of straight talk between the sexes.  There’s a great scene where Peter Klaven discovers exactly how graphic ladies’ conversations about their sexual relationships are.

JP:  Uh-huh, it kinda calls you out a little bit in every arena.

LMD:  Were any of you or people around you surprised by that? The men in my screening all sat back shocked in their seats.

JP:  Yeah, first of all people loved seeing Denise and Barry, mine and Fav’s characters; because we all know that couple or have been that couple where you just break-up to make up and you love to fight and it’s just constant, but they never break up.  You’re always around them and you’re like, “Oh, do we have to go out with them again?” You know what I mean? So, people loved that there was a lot of honesty in that relationship.

And then of course having a role-reversal where it’s not the girl who’s sitting there alone and they guys going out for guys’ night. It’s the girl going, ‘Can you get out of the house?’ It’s usually backwards.

Rashida Jones:  Amazing, I loved that.  I don’t know about for everybody, but for me that was a pretty honest portrayal of how girls talk. I mean we are De-Tailed.  I think that guys don’t actually know that, which is why I think it’s a good thing that it’s being represented in a movie cos you don’t get to see that that often.  It’s weird cos it’s not in the way that guys would expect; it’s not in a bragging way.  It’s just that we like to be really specific.  We like to know everything about everything that’s going on with each other, so that you can refer back to it later.  It’s a way to understand each other to know sexual details.

I really loved the dynamic between the girlfriends cos they all felt really different. They all had different points of view, but they found a way to converge and love each other through that and you don’t get to see that that often in the movies, either.  And also the fact that they were truly raw, the way that I know that I can be with my girlfriends.  We spare no feelings anywhere.

Jason Segel:  That’s a shame they didn’t know already because this thing about locker room talk between men, I think is a total myth.  At least the kind of guys Paul and I are, and thusly the kind of guys we hang out with.  It’s not like that; there’s a lot of silence when we’re hanging out, there’s just joking around, there’s watching TV there drinking some beers.  It’s women who are super, super dirty and explicit with their friends.  And I know this because whenever I’ve run into friends of an ex-girlfriend, they’re always like, “I know about you…”

LMD:  Did reading that explicit stuff in the script jolt any bad memories?

JS:  Not really.  I’m pretty good at it, so I always get positive feedback.

LMD:  Can you tell us what it was like on the set?  Jaime mentioned all the improvisation and I understand there’s a DVD’s worth of Paul giggling.

Paul Rudd:  Easily there’s that, I ruined a lot of takes.

JS:  Giggling isn’t even the right term.  Sometimes you would laugh yourself into tears.

PR:  There was an entire mag of film, which is the whole reel and it lasts about 12 to 15 minutes – an entire mag because I couldn’t even get one line out.  And John (director, Hamburg) would cut and I couldn’t stop and I’m crying.  And once you get a case of the giggles… and he just kept on.  He shot an entire mag and nothing was accomplished.

LMD:  How did the band Rush come into play?

JS:  Well, John Hamburg was actually in a band in high school called the Luv Rhinos -L.U.V. - and they covered Rush.  Rush is also actually the quintessential band that guys of that generation love and women kinda don’t get - and I don’t think that’ll offend them cos they seem aware of it.  But it was the perfect thing for Paul and I to bond over that would alienate Rashida.  We’ve tried to think of other bands, cos sometimes we get the question, “Well, if it wasn’t Rush, who would it have been?”  But nobody is quite like Rush in that regard.

LMD:  Can you talk about upcoming projects?

JS:  I’m writing the new Muppet Movie for Disney and I’m writing another movie for Judd {Apatow} called The Five Year Engagement, and I’m doing Gulliver’s Travels in England for the next five months and I’ve also been doing this animated movie called Despicable Me, where me and Steve Carrell play rival supervillains.

PR:  Jesus, Jason, you’re busy as hell!  I did wrote… I did wrote…

JS: {Laughs} He did wrote a show! I seent it!

PR:  He seent it!  My friends Rob Thomas and John Enbom, we wrote a show many years ago and actually it’s going to be on Starz.  We’re producing it it’s about caterers, called Party Down.  So, I hope to do some work on that and work on some of the scripts and write them.

~ The Lady Miz Diva

March 8^th, 2009

© 2006-2022 The Diva Review.com