Ben Wang loves starring in a weird movie

I spoke with Wang about working in that long-established dynamic, and, surprisingly given the movie’s deeply unserious nature, the serious side of finding truth in comedy cinema.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Andy Crump: (Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass) is such an unlikely movie. Who would think to tell this story using the structure of The Wizard of Oz? American Born Chinese does a similar thing by incorporating elements of Journey to the West. Did that detail come to your mind when you were cast?
Ben Wang: It would be really funny if the only reason I took it was because I only take movies that are based on story structures from classical, culturally relevant fables. But I take weird movies. Gimme a weird movie; I'll do it! 

The thing that got me interested in the movie was the script, and the thing that got me interested in the script was because it was the funniest thing I'd ever read, full stop. The style of humor that David (Wain) and Ken (Marino) put together, that’s the kind of humor that I'm into. It’s stupid, but it's smart. I don't know if I should describe this movie as the stupidest smart movie, the smartest stupid movie, the stupidest stupid movie, or the smartest smart movie, but it’s one of those. 

You don’t get a script that incredible every day, and I really wanted to be a part of it. I knew Ken and David’s previous movies, and their extended universe of castmates, so I was tickled about the whole thing.

AC: Filmmakers like Wain get to a point where they make a movie as an excuse to invite their friends over to hang out. You came into that dynamic between Wain’s recurring cast members. How did that feel? He does like to bring people back.
BW: He's got his guns, and he brings them every time [Laughs]. Honestly, it was kind of intimidating because everyone was so funny, it was my first time stepping in, and they had all worked together before, save for a few; they all seemed to have a shorthand together and were able to communicate telepathically about how they wanted each other to be funny. Part of it was telling myself, “Look, I'm not going to get it right away, but I'll bring what I think is funny and we'll see how that calibrates with what they do.” In the end, I think we got to a place where we were being funny in the same comedic universe, and true to our characters and to the world that (Wain and Marino) built—and also, you know, stupid enough to be smart and smart enough to be stupid.

AC: The amount of mileage Wain gets out of what could have been a gimmick—the Wizard of Oz sub-theme—is enormous. You described feeling intimidated. Did the fact that you were co-leading with Zoey diffuse that? This is her first David Wain movie as well. She may have been going through the same things.
BW: But she’s Zoey Deutch.

AC: True.
BW: She’s just good at everything. She was fine. She was cool. She wasn’t worried. I wasn’t saying to myself, “Wow, Zoey’s really going through it with me.” She was just showing up and killing it every single day. If anything, it made me think “oh crap!” 

But on another note, everybody in the whole cast was a real collection of peaches. Everybody was fantastic, and so much fun to work with, kind with their energy, and very welcoming. So all my anxiety was in my own head.

AC: Do you feel like you were able to filter that into Caleb? Just now, I could hear Caleb coming out. I wonder if there's a part of you that relates to him in terms of his anxieties, his nerves, and his negative self-talk.
BW: Yeah, I feel like Caleb has the emotional capacity of a 7-year-old, so everything he feels is very strong, and the things that don't make sense, really don't make sense. He doesn't have that adult layer of learning to hide his confusion, anxiety, or joy. It’s just all out there, except then the joke is that whenever he goes into deal-making mode, he locks in real tight.

AC: All that said, where was the point in the movie where the sense of being in a David Wain movie normalized? Or does it ever normalize?
BW: No, the Wain-verse never normalizes [Laughs]. There's nothing normal about being in a David Wain movie. The first day of shooting was that last scene: the wedding, and  Jon Hamm descending in a hot air balloon.

AC: That's just how he gets around though, right?
BW: The first thing that we shot was me, John Slattery and Ken Marino in suits, standing in a circle trying to come up with ad libs. John really wanted to say something about giving the bridesmaids, “a little Slattery flattery.” I don't remember who came up with that, but we shot about 70 versions of that, and then tried to figure out something for Caleb to say. In one of the takes, John says “Slattery flattery,” and I say, “Yeah, or Caleb…,” and I couldn't come up with anything. And that's what’s in the movie. They just cut out of that.

AC: To David, there’s nothing that can't be used.
BW: I think there’s nothing that can't be mined.

AC: That makes sense.
BW: And there’s nothing that can't be an opportunity for comedy, for humor. I know these are smart stupid movies, or stupid smart movies, but you have to understand: he is a very meticulous filmmaker. The rhythm and the editing is all part of why the funny moments are so funny. He goes in and he tweaks those at a minute level. And also, the writing is very meticulous. A lot of the material feels like it might have been ad-libbed, but the reality of it is, 95-98 percent of what you see and hear is as it is written on the page. The structure of the jokes is figured out.

It’s funny they wrote it (in the script), so that's the way we give it, and it's up to us as actors to make it feel like it's off the cuff. We make it feel like we're saying these lines for the first time. The truth is, these guys put together the comedy in a very meticulous way, and that's part of why it works so well. They put it together meticulously, but they make it look effortless and breezy.

AC: What do you feel you gathered from the experience? (David Wain films are) a completely different experience compared to making films with other people. I'm curious about what you learned about yourself as an actor in this environment where you felt this anxiety.
BW: Well, nothing that I didn't already know. This wasn't my first time discovering my anxiety. I had it before. I did a movie with Jackie Chan; I was sh*tting my pants then too. In some ways this was actually less intimidating than other experiences that I’ve had, but particularly it was working in this style of broad comedy—and by broad, I just mean that the characters are exaggerated versions of what you might see in real life, and part of the comedy comes from that exaggeration. These are not naturalistic characters, but they're also not unrealistic. There's still truth in all of these characters and where they come from, and that's part of what makes it work and why it's funny: it's exaggerated truth. I'd never worked on a movie in that way before, sort of a live-action cartoon, and that's what I was excited about coming into it.

AC: You used the word “truth,” and I think that's a great way to describe Caleb. In that surrealist environment, the truth Caleb communicates is necessary. Obviously, actors want to bring truth to their roles no matter what project they're making. I wonder if you have a new perspective on what it means to be true in a role now?
BW: Truth is always my North Star as an actor. I think if I've learned anything, it's that as long as you can bring truth (to a performance), it works every time. That is the most important thing. Everything else is built on top of that. It's worked in all the other contexts that I've worked in so far. I did think, “Maybe you can be too truthful in a cartoon,” but I brought it, and it worked—I hope. I guess that's up to (viewers) to decide, but I think it fits the universe.

At the end of the day, that's why we go to the theater. That's why we go to movies: to witness truth in some sort of context, because that's rare. We do see truth every day, but it's only one version of truth. In this case, you set those parameters for the character, and those parameters are outrageous. But once you set that machine up, then you figure out how it works in every single context. It's a crazy machine, but then how would it realistically interact with all of these other crazy things? That's the fun of it, and that's what people want to see: how this crazy kid would interact with that crazy guy. That's where the laughs come from too. It’s like: “Oh yeah, that’s how that works!"