ST. VINCENT written and directed by Theodore Melfi, with Bill Murray, Jaeden Lieberher, Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts. An Entertainment One release. 103 minutes. Opens Friday (October 17). For venues and times, see Movies.
Melissa McCarthy is having a pretty good weekend. She’s at the Toronto Film Festival in support of St. Vincent, which means she gets to hang around with Bill Murray for hours at a stretch – though last night, that meant hugging some very damp fans on a rainy red carpet.
Today, McCarthy is calmer and quieter. Like most comic performers, she’s not “on” all the time – though her energy can’t help but rise when she talks about working with Murray.
“It was like a master class, just watching and learning,” she says. “For God’s sake, don’t push. If he’s not pushing, don’t. I’d have to remind myself, just be in the room with him. You kinda want to juggle fire, just to show him: ‘Here’s my trick!’
“But no, it’s a quiet scene, so I don’t have any tricks,” she says, mock-sighing. “I don’t have any tricks in this scene, I just have to show up and try to stay with him. That was scary, but it was my favourite stuff, because he’s so subtle.”
McCarthy was in awe of Murray on the set.
“He sits in the pocket of stuff so beautifully. He really knows how funny he is. I think he’s one of the funniest people on the planet. And he’s so smart and funny that he could have thrown in three, four lines in every single scene, made the whole movie different. He could have gotten crazy laughs because he just can, whenever he wants.
“But he didn’t. He was just quiet and subtle and used the negative space between his lines to make people love him.”
St. Vincent casts McCarthy as Maggie, a newly single mom who moves in next door to Murray’s cranky Vincent, and winds up hiring him to watch her son (Jaeden Lieberher) after school.
Maggie could have come across as a generic supporting role – the defensive, overprotective mom – but McCarthy gives her a few intriguing layers, not the least of which is the sense that she’s quietly traumatized by her job as a hospital CT scan technician.
“I’ve never thought about someone who sits there and watches that all day, and can’t register [emotion] and isn’t supposed to,” she says. “You’re just sucking in all that sad stuff on top of your own life dissolving. I just thought, ‘Where does that go?'”
Having played another complex character in this summer’s Tammy (which she co-wrote with her husband, Ben Falcone, who also directed), McCarthy is keen to keep exploring those roles while still making comedies.
“My husband and I wrote another one that we’re gonna shoot in March, and he’ll direct again,” she says. “And there’s another really fun one, Spy, coming out that I did with Paul Feig. We have another one after that, but we haven’t started writing it.
“That’ll be very different,” she says. “It’s just a drama. That’ll really confuse everyone.”
Interview Clip
Melissa McCarthy on the message of St. Vincent, and how the movie’s characters are all a little more complex than they first appear:
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
