WAMG Interview: Melissa Rauch – Star and Co-Writer of THE BRONZE

Read my review of THE BRONZE HERE

Melissa Rauch is best known for her role as role as Dr. Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory but the actress is making her mark on the big screen with the upcoming comedy THE BRONZE, in which she plays Hope Annabelle Gregory, a former bronze-winning Olympic gymnast. Melissa wrote the film along with her husband and writing partner Winston Rauch. We Are Movie Geeks was part of a round-table interview with Melissa Rauch when she was in town last week to promote THE BRONZE.

Interview conducted March 5th, 2016

Q: Does this come from a personal history? Were you a gymnast as a young girl?

MR:  I’m super unathletic and very uncoordinated, but I’ve always love gymnastics. My husband and I love watching the Olympics together. The whole idea came about when I started having just a little bit of success on this VH1 Talking Heads show I was on.  I went back to my hometown in New Jersey, and at my local mall the guy who sells pretzels gave me a free pretzel because he liked that show and I was so excited about that. About four months after that the show was canceled and I was out of work and I was at the unemployment office. I went back to that mall and the same guy wouldn’t give me a pretzel this time! He ignored me! I was in such a dark place feeling really worried about what my next job was going to be and not getting that pretzel just highlighted how bad I was feeling. That got us talking about how fickle fame is and celebrity in a small town especially and then the idea just grew from there.

Question: Were you going for the SCARFACE record for cussing? 

Melissa Rauch: We honestly did not set up to do that. It just happened along the way. We really had no intention to include profanity at all. But when we came up with this character, we knew she was dark and angry and bitter. We came up with a full outline of exactly what her journey would be but it was really when we started plugging in the dialogue we began thinking about what she was experiencing. She had been cut off of her passion because of her injury and she’s no longer able to do what she loves to do. On top of that, she was told to act a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, eat a certain way. And now that she’s not able to do any of that anymore. She’s decided to rebel against everything.

Q: Setting in a small town gives it some real charm without backing off from the humor. Were you thinking about that when you set it in the Midwest?

MR:  We wanted to set it in the Midwest because so many wonderful athletes have come from that area and we wanted a small town where her celebrity could last longer. My college roommate was from a small town really close to Amherst and she had that exact same accent. I had a really heavy New Jersey accent. She would make fun of my accent and I would make fun of hers. I knew that was the accent I wanted to have and I worked with a dialogue coach on it.

WAMG: Let’s talk about that sex scene. Was that a body double?

MR:  Yes.

WAMG: How do you go about choreographing something like that?

MR:  You write what you know.  That was not in the original script. We knew at that point that hope and Lance would get together, but it wasn’t until we were actually writing the scene that Winston and I looked at each other and thought that since these were two world-class gymnast, of course this would happen so we just wrote the most crazy epic gymnastics sex scene ever. Then we bullet-pointed, I’m never read a porn script but I guess this is what they do, exactly how the moves would happen. When the director came onboard, we had our gymnastics coordinator as well. When we hired her we didn’t think that we would have to have her coordinate the sex scene as well. She ended up choreographing that. She choreographed it with two fully clothed dancers at first to see how it would play out. Then we had to find the perfect room for it.  We found a handicap accessible room with handles in it for them to grab onto.

Q: Who wrote the rap song at the end?

MR:  That is an interesting story there’s a song in the movie called Boss Ass Bitch by these rappers PTAF. When they saw the movie they wanted to put an original song in it. Originally they just recorded the rap and I wasn’t in it at all. They thought it would be fun if I came in and said a few words, drop a line here and there. We were on our way to the studio to record it. We were editing, it was a really crazy time. My husband Winston, who has written a lot of comedy, thought it would be great if I went full-on rap. It was unbelievable. We ran in there and did it. I never felt more gangster.

WAMG:  Is your character based on Tonya Harding at all?

MR:  It wasn’t based on her at all. It was a fictionalized version. Looking back, the bangs are very much her. Tanya was an underdog in many ways.

WAMG: Have you heard from her?

MR:  We were actually going to try to see if we could do some promo marketing stuff with her but we’re not sure if the schedule is going to work. I saw a documentary about her that was phenomenal.

Q: What is your opinion of these “America’s sweethearts” that are so popular at a certain age? Such as Kerri Strug

MR:  Hope is so very different from them. I think that all of these other heroes were able to go on and do all of these amazing things such as inspire the next generation of gymnast.  In Hope’s situation she has this father that has enabled her so heavily that she is not able to reset and re-engage, or is even willing to frankly. I think fame is hard in any capacity.  It’s so fleeting, it’s not anything that you can really grab. For these young girls to have such an amount of fame put on them at a young age I think it’s a testament to how strong they are that are able to have these incredible lives.

WAMG: The movie is so vulgar. Are there any scenes that you two wrote that you just couldn’t go there – that you just couldn’t film?

MR:  Oh we filmed them. They’re just not in the movie.  There’s a longer cut of the sex scene. There’s also a dry run of the sexing without the stunt doubles. There’s a scene in the bar where I proposition those guys where I end up in a bathroom stall with another random dude. There’s also a great scene where I punch Gary. There’s a very long version of a wake-up montage where I’m grabbing him by the balls and slapping him in the face with dildos. It’s a very intense wake-up scene.

Q: Where did the idea of the fish come from?

MR:  The nugget of that came from my brother who had the fish.  We were really wanted Stan to have a friend. Hope was so awful to him, always beating him down, we wanted to have someone that he could connect with and parenting properly. This gave Stan another layer to his struggle and what he was going through.

Q: The casting is so fantastic especially that young girl Haley Lu Richardson. Was this your dream cast for these rolls?

 MR:  It was. The way that these actors played the roles is far better than anything we ever could have imagined. Haley was an incredible find. She’s a competitive dancer so she was able to do a lot of her own floor routines and some of the stuff on the beam. She just came in and nailed it. We needed someone that was young enough to be believably competing in the sport but old enough that all this is not so horrible for them. And with Sebastian Stan, we couldn’t believe that this guy from CAPTAIN AMERICA wanted to be in our movie. He such an incredibly skilled actor. We were shooting for 22 days in Ohio for little money, An incredibly intense shooting schedule and these people just came in and worked for next to nothing. You see a lot of Sebastian in that sex scene. He just went for it. He learned all of the choreography. And Thomas Middleditch, it was important that is twitch was authentic and real. We didn’t want to make it any caricature or make a joke out of it. You handled that beautifully. And of course Gary Cole I had worked with on my very first job. It was something that never aired called 12 Miles of Bad Road.  He was so kind and warm in such a phenomenal actor. We thought of him right away.

WAMG: There’s a lot of depth to that relationship between Hope and her father.

MR:  Thank you. We knew we could’ve gone with just a glossy and shiny broad comedy route with it but we really just wanted to tell the story and crank up the comedy in certain places.  It wasn’t important to have a joke every minute.  It was really more about telling this story and let the comedy or the drama be dictated by what was true to the story.

Q: You don’t find women doing this type of comedy. So you are, in a sense, breaking another ceiling. How do you feel about that?

MR:  There are so many male antiheroes but not nearly as many female antiheroes.  There’s a lot of pressure on female characters to be likable. That puts a lot of pressure on women to be likable. There’s something to be said for the fact that there are great movies like Cate Blanchett in BLUE JASMINE, which is obviously very different movie, but that is such a great layered and complex character. Those are the roles that I am drawn to and want to write. One of my favorite movies is Bette Davis in ALL ABOUT EVE and it is shocking there was no pressure on her to be likable. We didn’t want to water this down. We could have made her more palatable but Hope is not likable because she doesn’t like herself. She loves the former version of herself. She has this façade of narcissism and really being pleased with herself. Even the bangs are the banngs she had 10 years ago when she was at her best. She likes to watch those moments and that brings up her a lot of pleasure.

Q: Are you and your husband writing anything else now?

MR:  We are. We have another movie that we are working on called THE METER MAID. I like to play women in uniform.  We just started writing a pilot for HBO called The Troop which is about a Girl Scout troop. They were the best Girl Scout troop ever at age 12 but then they all reunite when they’re in their 30s and realize they have really screwed up lives.

Q: Did you purposely planned THE BRONZE for an Olympic year?

MR:  We didn’t. It was supposed to come out last July and there was some distribution issues and it kept getting pushed back and now it’s great that this is an Olympic year.