“You rarely see a movie now where the big question is, ‘How the fuck did this get made? Who let them do this?’”
Tony award winner WIll Brill asks this aloud over a meal with Variety at West Hollywood’s Canter’s Deli. Brill starts with a steaming bowl of soup at 11 a.m. before joyfully moving on to French toast. The Broadway vet is rail thin, but as hungry for diner classics as he is to discuss “The Musical” — his darkly comic Sundance gem that’s now rolling out in limited theatrical release.
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Brill plays the nebbish Doug, a middle school theater teacher smitten with his colleague Abigail. When he learns that his beloved has taken up with the school’s principal — a smug “Chad” played expertly by Rob Lowe — Doug sets off on an absurd revenge quest. Lowe’s principal is out for a blue ribbon prize from the school district, and to sabotage his ambitions Doug stages an original musical in secret starring his earnest, talented young students. The titular musical is a recounting of the 9/11 terror attacks, with original music and cardboard Twin Towers ablaze.
While audacious and almost surely offensive, Brill and his director Giselle Bonilla pull off the impossible: a broadly comic look at obsession and bitterness, laced with a healthy dose of sunshine thanks to its innocent cast of kids. Here, he discusses revenge, risky cinema and the jokes left on the cutting room floor.
I understand you have a deep connection to student theater.
Will Brill: What’s cool in a holistic sense about this movie, is that I came from doing children’s theater. I started when I was six years old. I was in “The Velveteen Rabbit.” I remember distinctly the auditions and the chaos and the friendships built — and the gunning for the same roles and never getting them. Some kids were always ahead of you. What’s so funny about this movie is [my character] is the one experiencing the petty highs and lows, and he’s the adult in the room. A lot of my comedy specifically comes from never getting cast as the leading man in anything. I was always the kid playing the old man or having to do funny voices. I was the badger in “The Wind and the Willows” and the king in “Cinderella.”
Why do you think those were the parts you got?
They put me in those roles because I was so obsessed with Robin Williams and Jim Carrey and was trying to emulate those guys. And still! When Robin died, I couldn’t — I still haven’t really watched his movies because I think of him as a part of who I am.
This film is about revenge, which is one of the more human tendencies to make a movie about.
Anybody can identify with having lost a person with whom they were infatuated, or a job that they thought was going to change the course of their life. We did a marketing push for this movie where we asked strangers, “What is the pettiest thing you’ve ever done?” It helped me remember that in my sophomore year of college, there was this girl I had an ongoing flirtation with, but she wanted to keep it secret. Another guy was love with her. We come back from break and she’s dating this other guy. She asked me how my summer was, and I just said, “Oh, I started dating someone. I have a girlfriend back at home.”
Which directly mirrors the plot of this movie. You were lying when you said that?
It was a lie! I pulled the name of a close friend of mine at home. And it makes me think — my character in “The Musical,” Doug, is so obviously a villain. There are people who will watch this movie and say, “I can’t get behind this because he’s so wretched, and because what he’s doing is so bad.” But I think most people will realize, “He’s doing the thing that all of us have fantasized about, and none of us have the cojones to do.”
They should come work in Hollywood for a day.
That’s a good point. Doug wants a kind of [creative success], but he wouldn’t last a day here. He’d never survive what most of us have been through in this industry.
It was a creative risk, incorporating 9/11 so heavily into this story, especially involving a kids theater troupe. It illustrates how far you character is willing to go to embarrass his nemesis. Were you ever nervous about how it would play?
[Our screenwriter] Alex Heller and I were talking about this last night. I was obsessed with the character from the start, and Alex said he watched the original “The Producers” and “Election” when writing this. After, he just wrote in his notes app, “Fuck it: 9/11 musical.” It’s so funny because it’s a really insane thing to do. It’s so callous and despicable. What’s interesting is that some of our kid actors had done plays about 9/11 in school. But this movie [takes a shot] at everyone. You see the snowflake liberal school administration people get so overwhelmed about anything off color. But something about putting that concept for a musical in the hands of children defangs it. The musical’s audience in the film are all horrified, but you also see them gasp and crack up because the kids are so winning.
You’ve done a lot of Broadway and a lot of drama. Was it hard to lobby for such a broad comedic part?
Well, the proof of concept for this film starred an Instagram-famous performer. My first question to [director] Giselle Bonilla was, “Why didn’t you hire that guy?” She told me it was the same reason she’d offered the role to Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver before me. It’s the person [behind the character]. They initially offered me [Rob Lowe’s part of] the principal.
Once again, they cast you as the old man in the play.
There was a cycle of actors this went through before [I got the lead] and Gillian Jacobs was cast. 10 days before we started shooting, the previous leads dropped out. Coincidentally, our producer had a meeting with Rob Lowe and gave him the script and he was obsessed. Especially when he found out we were filming in L.A. He felt it was the kind of comedy he’d been dying to see for ages. You rarely see a movie now where the big question is, “How the fuck did this get made? Who let them do this?”
Rob is incredible in this film. The most smug – you describe him as a “Chad.”
My girlfriend and I were just talking about the people you meet in your life who are really performatively sincere. Typically, about veganism or human rights. She relayed this story to me about Cristin Milioti being at a table read. She was eating a hardboiled egg and one of her costars asked her, “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” And she said, “Uh, yeah.” He was like, “So you don’t have a problem eating female animals?”
Stop.
But Rob was incredible. He’s such a good improviser. There was a line they cut, when he sees the musical for the first time, it was: “You turned the gymnasium into Ground Zero. Are you fucking mental?” There was also another point where he said, “My brother was a first responder … in Burbank.”
You had a really strong premiere at Sundance, but it took a minute for a deal to get done to release this movie. I heard distributors were nervous about this.
I have definitely come to the to a reconciliation that my taste is not everyone’s taste, and my taste is especially not corporate America’s taste. I was listening to Andy Richter talking about the corporatization of the entertainment industry, and he’s so right. Nobody is able to go out and take chances anymore because people don’t want to support that. Rob has a list that he goes through of stuff that he can’t believe people funded. One of the OG’s is “The Book of Mormon.” You watch that and you’re like, “This is so inflammatory. This is so crazy.” You can say that they’re punching down, and there’s a whole talk that we can have about like the Church of Latter Day Saints and what they’ve earned and what they haven’t. But there is also there is also an element of love in that play for Mormons, which is really cool.
