Melissa McCarthy on Playing a Con Artist in ‘Identity Thief’
WRITER’S NOTE: This article was originally written in 2013.
Ever since she first found recognition for her character of Sookie St. James on “Gilmore Girls,” Melissa McCarthy has left an indelible impression on us all. After watching her breakthrough role as the abrasive and shamelessly raunchy Megan in “Bridesmaids,” a role which earned her a deserved Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, there was no forgetting who she was. McCarthy wasn’t just funny in the role, she also made Megan a complex character with wants and needs we could easily relate to, and this made her performance all the more wonderfully memorable.
Now she gets the opportunity to put her comedic skills to solid use again in “Identity Thief” as Diana, a con artist who steals the identity of Sandy Bigelow Patterson (played by Jason Bateman) for her own benefit. This actually marks McCarthy’s first lead role in a motion picture, and it came as the result of Bateman loving her performance in “Bridesmaids.” The role of Diana was originally written as a man, but Bateman had the character’s gender changed to a woman just so he could get her cast in the movie.
Now the role of a con artist is a challenging one to make the least bit sympathetic, but McCarthy proved to be up to the challenge. She got her start at The Groundlings which is an improvisational and sketch comedy troupe located in Los Angeles, but while this character would have made for a hilarious five-minute sketch, McCarthy realized she had to do things differently in a feature length motion picture. She made this clear in her interview with Amy Longsdorf of Delaware Online.
“I wanted to make sure Diana wasn’t just a one-dimensional, mustache-twirling villain because I thought that while that’s kind of interesting for a scene, I don’t know how to play that for a whole movie,” McCarthy told Longsdorf. “I love the thought of someone doing criminal acts but not doing them to be menacing. She does them because she’s lonely and doesn’t have anyone. She kind of steals identities so she can go out to a store and pretend to have these lives. She can pretend to have a husband and a family, pretend to be engaged.”
Whether it is film or television she is doing, McCarthy is a comic force of nature and she appears fearless in what she will do to get a laugh. This was especially the case when she hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live” and came close to swallowing a whole bottle of ranch salad dressing. I was lucky enough to attend the “Identity Thief” press conference which I covered for the website We Got This Covered, and I asked her if there ever is a limit to how far she will go for a laugh, or if she is willing to do anything to get one.
“For me, I think as long as it makes sense for the character,” McCarthy said. “I like to see if you can, on the worst day or the most extreme circumstance, I like to see how far you can push it. But to me it’s not funny anymore if it doesn’t make sense. And I don’t like to do anything that’s mean-spirited just because I don’t find it funny. I’d rather be the jackass than make fun of somebody else because that just seems too cheap and easy. So those are my only limits.”
The one thing, however, that McCarthy was more fearless about than getting laughs was doing her own stunts. It turns out that she tried to do as many of them as possible on the set of “Identity Thief,” and Bateman was stunned at just how far she was willing to go. She even volunteered to do the stunt where Diana gets hit by a car, and it does look very painful when you watch it onscreen. McCarthy ended up admitting to Kevin P. Sullivan of MTV News that she and Bateman did a lot of hand-to-hand combat in order to make their fight scenes look more believable.
“We hurt each other the most, for real, and the most exhausting,” McCarthy said. “You’re just covered in bruises and muscles are ripped.”
Many also wonder where McCarthy comes up with the inspirations for each character she portrays. It is said most actors base their characters on people they grew up with or whom they remember from their hometowns. McCarthy herself was raised on a farm in Plainfield, Illinois, and during the press conference she realized that her upbringing still plays a big part in the roles she chooses.
“In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it’s someone in my head saying I know that woman,” McCarthy said. “There are women like that in my hometown and there’s one like that the Midwest. I guess I do kind of always go back to that them and draw from there because I really love them. I find them great and interesting and quirky and eccentric. I think everything that any actor does, I would assume, is shaped by how and where they grew up. I steal a lot from a lot of Midwestern women that I weirdly watch, that’s what I should say.”
We are going to be seeing a lot more of Melissa McCarthy in the near future as her star continues to rise in Hollywood. In addition to her television show, “Mike & Molly,” she has a number of starring roles in movies coming up like “The Heat” with Sandra Bullock. No matter what that thoughtless snob Rex Reed may think of her, McCarthy is a superb comedic actress who has many unforgettably hilarious performances left to give the world.
SOURCES:
Amy Longsdorf, “Melissa McCarthy morphs into ‘Identity Thief,'” Delaware Online, February 9, 2013.
Ben Kenber, “Interview with Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy on Identity Thief,” We Got This Covered, February 8, 2013.
Kevin P. Sullivan, “Melissa McCarthy’s ‘Identity Thief’ Fight Bloodied Up Jason Bateman… Kinda,” MTV News, February 8, 2013.
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