Katie Crocker - Associate Editor
While shooting “Horrible Bosses 2,” Charlie Day sat down to chat with press about the sequel and what fans can expect!
So, we’ve heard you all laugh quite a bit on set, is it hard to keep a straight face?
Yeah, I laugh all the time, and it’s terrible. I don’t know if it’s a nervous habit or… I just really enjoy getting to do this and it’s not wasted on me of what an incredible gift it is. It’s also in my barometer for whether or not the take is working. I get sort of nervous if I’m not laughing because I feel like I have a good sense of what’s going to make the audience laugh and it’s what makes me laugh, so hopefully I will laugh. I should be a little bit more professional about it, it’s true; I’m wasting people’s time.
So your character has fiancé in the first “Horrible Bosses,” where is she now?
Yes, they’re now married and they have three baby girls, triplets. So he’s in a little over his head on this film. Having quit his job and opening up this business, he’s got a lot more riding on it now.
And what’s his relationship with Jennifer’s character?
It’s pretty much gone, he’s turned his back and walked away and she thinks of him now as the one that got away. You know, the only man who ever refused her. She just won’t let it go, she hunts him down at one point in this film.
What’s it like, this dynamic coming back together for a sequel now ?
It’s great; it almost feels like every great fortune is a great crime. It almost feels unfair to get the opportunity to work with people that you love and laugh a lot with. To get to come to work and make something that will make people at home laugh, it’s the greatest job in the world so, to get to do it again, I feel very lucky.
Can you talk about your process on how you keep it fresh, as you do the take over and over and how many cookies did you eat?
(Laughs). Well I’m just having a bite per take, but I think I’m at least into four and a half cookies now. Fortunately, I’m a big fan of cookies so I’m handling it alright. The process for keeping it fresh each take is trying to find a way to just do it a little bit better each time. Every take is a new opportunity to try and find something new and something that you haven’t thought of or something funnier, or something you did well and you want to make sure you repeat it in case that take gets used.
You only have a few days of shooting left, are you sad to leave it?
Yeah, I’m sad to leave it. The first one has been like this and the second has been that every now and then, you’re lucky enough to work with great actors. I’ve really been enjoying working with Christoph and Chris Pine now is fantastic and Spacey on the first film and Aniston, and then Sudeikis and Bateman. The cast that they put together is incredible so, it’s a dream job.
Is there a scene you can recall, with you three together where you went off the page and you couldn’t stop laughing-
The thing that really got me was, there’s a sequence where we are plotting the actual kidnapping, and it’s slightly intense and very serious. I was just supposed to say one line with no sense of humor and those three guys would not stop laughing at me (laughs). I could not get through the scene. It was just some simple line of, ‘then we get to the car and we get the money’ or something that just sounded ridiculous coming out of my mouth. So, there have been a couple of those. There’s usually something Jason Bateman does that really puts me over the edge.
I heard you’re sort of master inventors in this one, could you sort of setup what they’ve made or what kind of business it is ?
They stumbled onto one good idea and they’re going all in with this bet. They’ve come up with a contraption that instantly provides soap, shampoo and water all at the same time to wash your hair as quickly as possible. Probably not for everyone, but they’re assuming maybe there’s enough people to make a living. Then they get the opportunity to build it, and it’s stolen immediately.
So what did you guys learn from being bosses? I heard that’s the take on this sequel, now they’re own boss.
Yeah, now they’re their own bosses, horrible in a different sense of the word, that they’re horrible at the job. There’s the horrible boss that treats their employees bad and then there’s the horrible boss that drives the company into the ground and ruins everyone’s livelihoods, and that’s where they are. They start out realizing that or they get really quickly to a point where they realize they’re in over their heads and they’ve done a really bad thing and they’ve been naive and lost their business in a very stupid way. Then of course, they turn immediately to crime.
Have you had a horrible boss in your life? Or what’s the worst job you’ve had?
I kind of don’t remember, because I think I was always…I never took my bosses too seriously because I was always sort of thinking ‘oh, I’m going to go do this acting thing and do something else,’ so I never took it to heart. I’m sure I had plenty of bosses that I didn’t love but I don’t really remember a specific one. I didn’t last very long at my jobs; I was more of a horrible employee. I was fired quite often.
