While a comedy at heart, the film also navigates Reese’s character Margot’s feelings of frustration and isolation as a woman who has bucked against the traditional expectations of her family and rejected marriage and other conventional milestones that so many of us feel pressured to tick off.
“There’s something in this movie about modern female attitudes towards marriage, because it sort of runs the gamut – whether you should get married, [whether] you shouldn’t get married, [whether] you love the traditional aspects of it, or whether that feels antiquated to you. So that’s a discussion that lives inside the film, that feels very contemporary.”
Will and Reese sat down to take GLAMOUR’s Bestie Test, which spanned the importance of feminist allyship on set and filming that alligator wrestling scene.
GLAMOUR: Will, tell us everything about filming wrestling an alligator.
Reese: Was it harder or easier than a bear? Didn’t you say you wrestled a bear?
Will: I had a bear chase me! Not a real bear. But [the alligator wrestle was] quite strenuous, the pretend alligator was quite heavy, and moved like a real alligator, I imagine. Yeah, it was an arduous day, but you could feel between Reese’s reaction and how she was ordering me around… I was like, ‘oh, there’s a really good chance this scene will be funny’.
GLAMOUR: Will, what surprised you the most about working with Reese?
Will: I would say that with Hello Sunshine and how much Reese does as a producer, as you know, a lot of the episodic stuff she’s done recently that it was so fun to get in the comedy battleground with her, and to see that she is as funny an actress as anyone I’ve ever worked with.
I loved it because we both were in these scenes, and while we’re saying ridiculous things and screaming at each other. It’s a heightened context, and yet she’s playing it as real as I am, and that’s what I think is at the heart of any good comedy.
GLAMOUR: Reese, Will has been dubbed as a feminist ally, most likely because he went on record saying that women should run the world…
Will: It’s true.
GLAMOUR: How have you seen him show up for women on set, and live that truth?
Reese: Will is the ultimate ally, just in terms of the generosity on set, of really listening to my perspective, the other female producers perspective, also lifting up other people’s ideas. He’s just a generous soul and a generous human.
You don’t have to be when you’ve been established for years and years, and you’re known as this person who makes movies happen and his comedy is what drives us getting into these films. He doesn’t have to take the time, but he really does, and also, for all the young people too, he sets a really good example of this straddling this line of getting the work done, but also having this little childish excitement to still jump off the edge of a dock onto a boat.
