STACK April 2017 Issue 83

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who are brilliant comedians, but who
also have real drama chops, because in
my movies, the characters themselves
think they’re in a drama. It’s only the
world that is comedic.
So I really wanted Bryan, and James
perfectly embodied a guy who has no
filter and says what he wants. He is
really sweet and has a heart of gold,
and is smart and thoughtful. But you
may just not quite understand him at
first blush. I didn’t know James well.
We knew each other a little bit, but
what I knew of his work and knowing
him a tiny bit, it felt like he would be
perfect. That to me was the dream cast.
The two characters at the centre
of this film really don’t get on, but
they’re both really nice guys deep
down. How essential was that to
making the story work?
The idea wasn’t that there’s a villain
and a hero, or that their characters
are black and white, because I find
that people aren’t like that in
real life. One happens to be
this extreme, quite wealthy
tech mogul, but he’s still a
human being. That was really
important to me, to try to create
these dynamic, fully-fleshed
out characters, and have the
audience’s perceptions change
almost while they’re watching the
movie.
You might, in the early scenes, think
that James’s character is so extreme
and how could anybody be with him?
How could any woman really be in love
with him? But as it goes on, I think you
start to realize, “This guy, he’s sweet.
He wants a family. He really loves this
woman. He loves this dad and mom
and brother.”
And Bryan’s character is kind of an
everyman type of dad who is struggling
to hold on in a world that is evolving
faster than he can process. He can’t
accept that life involves change.
Because he had it
all five or ten years
ago. His life was
perfect, everything
was going well. He
had a business. But
the world changes so
rapidly, and I thought
that was an interesting
thing to explore,
through these two
flawed, but ultimately
good-hearted, humans.
Bryan was well-known for Malcolm,
but it’s another level after Breaking
Bad. Is it fun to play with the
iconography he brings to it?
Absolutely. That happened in Meet
the Parents with Robert De Niro. It
was like, “What if the guy from Raging
Bull and Taxi Driver and Goodfellas was
your father-in-law?” Obviously people
know Bryan as Walter White, and we’re
saying, you know, Walter White started
as a pretty normal every day guy. He
became Heisenberg, but what if instead
he’s that guy and he’s the ultimate dad.
But he’s got an edge to him. In Malcolm
his character, I think, had less edge
than Ned does in Why Him? He doesn’t
go as far as Walter White, becoming
Heisenberg. But he tries to hack into
Franco’s computer. He does some fairly
extreme things. It’s kind of a merging
almost of those two characters, in a
weird way.
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John Hamburg on set with KISS
Walter White
started as a
pretty normal
every day guy