Melissa McCarthy: "It's a fist fight to try to get comedies made right now"
In a new interview, McCarthy expresses concern over how hard it is to get comedy made in a time when "we’ve never needed to laugh more”
Take it from Melissa McCarthy, one of the most prolific comic character actors of this generation: taking a comedy from idea to premiere is a brutal process these days.
“It’s a fist fight to try to get comedies made right now. And I don’t know why, because we’ve never needed to laugh more,” McCarthy tells The Observer’s Eva Wiseman. “Comedy allows you to sit next to somebody whose ideas don’t match up. And maybe you come out a little closer. I think that’s what I’m supposed to be doing in this world.”
The Little Mermaid star continues: “I can’t do a lot of useful things. I don’t know how to clean up the oceans or stop our violent tendencies. But I can hopefully give someone who’s had a bad day an hour and a half to go into a different world where bills or illness isn’t the top thing on their brain. That’s the only skill set I really have. So I have to keep trying.”
Despite her passion for comedy, McCarthy doesn’t hold back when discussing her hardest experiences working in the discipline. McCarthy specifically recalls one set so stressful it changed the way she approached every on-set experience that followed.
“I did work for someone once who ran such a volatile, hostile set that it made me physically ill,” McCarthy says. “My eyes were swelling up, I was absorbing all of this nuttiness.”
“There were people weeping, visibly so upset by this one person,” she adds. “And I think that’s why the manipulation worked, because to get to me this person would fire people I loved, which kept me quiet. It was very effective. Then one day, I was like, ‘It stops today!’ I just kept saying to them, it stops, it stops. And I know now I’ll never keep quiet again.”