‘This Isn’t Church — You Can Have Fun’: Paul Feig on ‘The Housemaid’
SOURCE:Rolling Stone|BY:David Fear
The director of the gloriously trashy Sydney Sweeney-and-Amanda Seyfried thriller weighs in on his leads, those WTF twists, and why a movie is like a martini
In Conversation
The director of the gloriously trashy Sydney Sweeney-and-Amanda Seyfried thriller weighs in on his leads, those WTF twists, and why a movie is like a martini
“I mean, is there anything more beautiful than this?”
Paul Feig is admiring the duo of martinis that the most discreet and polite server in uptown New York has put down before us. Tucked into a booth in a dark corner of Bemelmans, the bar in the Carlyle Hotel, the 63-year-old filmmaker holds up his tiny cocktail glass — a type colloquially named the “Nick & Nora,” after the hard-drinking, light-quipping couple of the Thin Man movies — then clinks it against its twin before taking a sip. He’s chosen this meeting place because it happens to carry Artingstalls, his personal brand of London dry gin, and how better to conduct an interview on a Tuesday afternoon than with a cross-promotional drink? “I make good movies,” Feig says. “I make great martinis.”
His love of a perfectly constructed martini is one of three things Feig might be best known for among the profile-reading public. The second is his devotion to dressing up, preferably in Savile Row suits with matching tie-and-pocket-square combos (he’s been a serious clotheshorse since his early teens). The third involves introducing Melissa McCarthy to mainstream audiences and getting Maya Rudolph to shit in the street. Between directing Bridesmaids, the 2011 blockbuster that broke cultural glass ceilings and remains one of the funniest movies of the 21st century, directing numerous episodes of The Office (26 in all), and creating the perfect blend of heartfelt and cringe in Freaks and Geeks, Feig has helped revolutionize big- and small-screen comedy several times over. He had a brief career as a stand-up before playing the comic relief in TV series like The Jackie Thomas Show and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, then pivoting full-time to making films like The Heat (2013), Spy (2015), and an unexpectedly controversial reboot of Ghostbusters (2016). The gentleman knows funny.
The punchline: Feig’s latest film, The Housemaid, is anything but a comedy. If you’re familiar with Freida McFadden’s 2022 novel, about a young woman named Millie Calloway who takes a position as a live-in servant for a wealthy Long Island family, you can attest that “hilarious” isn’t exactly how you’d label this psychological thriller. And as both readers of the book and audiences who’ve seen Feig’s whipsmart adaptation, which opened on December 19th and stars as Millie and as her employer Nina Winchester, neither the story’s major WTF plot twists nor the bloody climax fit the definition of “humorous.” “Sidesplitting,” maybe — but more in the literal rather than the figurative sense.
“I love thrillers,” Feig admits. “I like the high stakes of them. That’s kind of all I watch — I don’t watch much comedy at all. And if you look at what someone like Zach Cregger is doing with a movie like Weapons — a lot of us in comedy are going this way because we’re getting a double response from an audience. You know, when you get a laugh, you get a laugh. But when you get a jump or a scream or something, then you usually get a nervous-release type of laugh too. The two are very connected.”
Feig had dabbled in lecinéma du airport read before with A Simple Favor, his 2018 take on Darcy Bell’s novel about a momfluencer searching for her missing friend in the upper-crust suburbs of Connecticut. It was popular enough for the director to reunite with stars Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively for a sequel, Another Simple Favor, that came out earlier this year — the rare time that Feig says he’s been coaxed in to making a follow-up, since “even when people want them, or think they want them, I tend not to want to do them. The sense of discovery is usually gone. That one was an exception.” It was while working on the second Simple Favor movie that Lively suggested he keep an eye out for actor Brandon Sklenar, who she was working with on her project It Ends With Us; Feig ended up casting Sklenar as Andrew, Nina’s saintly husband, in The Housemaid. (Asked recently on a podcast about his thoughts on the ongoing lawsuit soap opera around Lively’s movie, he admitted that he has not been following this torrid saga but remains solidly “Team Blake.”)
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You could still label A Simple Favor as more of a black comedy than an outright thriller, however. So when his producing partner brought him the script for The Housemaid, a huge part of the appeal for Feig was getting to make something that hewed closer to the suspenseful, scary, yet also fun Hitchcock films he loves. Even better was the fact that he’d get to work with Sweeney. The star was already attached to play Millie, and had come on as an executive producer. Feig was a fan. “I knew her from The White Lotus and all that,” he says. “But it was when I saw Reality” — the 2023 drama about whistleblower Reality Winner — “that I realized, ‘Oh, this actor is amazing!’ The fact that she was able to play a character who hides so much, and then this other side of her comes out…. I just thought, yeah, she’s perfect for this.”
After Feig and Sweeney talked, she essentially greenlighted him as a director (“I don’t want to say Sydney fought for me, but she definitely pushed it through,” he admits). The director remembered having a meeting with Seyfried a decade or so ago, and both of them vowing over coffee to do something together someday. When her name came up as a possible choice for Nina, he began catching up on what she’d done in the intervening years, “just to be safe. I didn’t want to cast her simply because we hit it off. And then I saw The Dropout [where Seyfried plays Theranos CEO and convicted scammer Elizabeth Holmes], and thought, ‘She has 10 different personalities in that movie. Ok, this is a home run.'”
Paul Feig, the director of ‘The Housemaid.’ Rodin Eckenroth/FilmMagic
Feig also began poring through McFadden’s book, which he hadn’t read before getting Rebecca Sonnenshine’s script, and marking bits from the bestseller that might be worth adding in or expanding upon. “Adaptations are tough,” he notes, “because if you take a lot of liberties with the novel or take out their favorite parts out, people get mad. And if you just do a rote adaptation, people don’t give you credit for that, either. ‘Don’t just film the book! But also, make it just like the book!’ There were some of what I’d call water-cooler moments that were left out to make things run a little quicker, and which I thought might be good to find a way to include.
So what were the water-cooler moments that Feig added back in? He pauses, smiles, then takes a sip of his martini. “Well, we may be getting into spoiler territory now, David….”
Right. To those who have not seen The Housemaid yet: Let’s say that the presence of Millie in the posh household causes some tension between her and Nina, especially in regards to Nina’s hunky, kindly husband. Nina also seems prone to violent mood swings and inexplicably accusing her new hire of all sorts of sabotage. Because Millie has a criminal record, she can’t leave her new job. Also, what’s up with Millie’s room in the attic, which features a window that won’t open, a door that locks from the outside, and a serious Jane Eyre-meets-Gaslight vibe?
Amanda Seyfried in ‘The Housemaid.’ Courtesy of Lionsgate
In other words, these are recognizable characters in a very familiar melodramatic situation — all the better to take viewers through a series of narrative swerves and surprising left turns while fucking with their head. “For the first hour, the film is kind of a potboiler love triangle, and Millie is like the audience, trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on here,” Feig notes. “Sydney is really, really good at doing that wide-eyed, I’m-kinda-helpless thing, and you know that eventually, a tiger is going to come out of her. I always love to set up stereotypes upfront: She’s the innocent girl who’s down on her luck, this is the kooky rich lady, this is the handsome, perfect husband. It’s exactly the kind of thing you can keep pushing, pushing, pushing right up to a breaking point. When I first read it, I thought I could add….”
Feig stops, searching for the right, non-spoilery phrase. “I think ‘comedy’ is too strong a word, because look, there’s some really dark shit in here. But I thought, we can have some fun with this. Some really dark fun.” He mentions a moment in the second act, in which a character appears to get their comeuppance. “I always laugh at that point because the audience cheers, and I just think, ‘Oh you’re going to be so sorry you did that in about 20 minutes.'”
And believe us when we say that The Housemaid is exactly the kind of exquisite gothic trash — think The Real Housewives of Bronte Hills — that was made to be seen with an audience. “People say that nobody wants to go the theater anymore,” Feig says. “No, they just don’t want to spend money on going to the theater to be shoveled the same old mediocre… I don’t want to say ‘shit.’ [Pause] Ok, well, the same old mediocre ‘shit.’ When I see movies like Sinners and Weapons do incredible box office and fill theaters, it gives me hope. It’s what Jordan Peele does so well. You hear about Get Out, I gotta be there opening weekend. You hear about Nope, I gotta be there opening weekend. I don’t know what it’s about, but something about it sounds like something I haven’t seen before, so I need to have that experience. I kept telling audiences at our word-of-mouth screenings, ‘This isn’t church. You can have fun.’ Because that’s the experience moviegoers are still chasing!
“You have to give them something undeniable,” Feig continues. “That’s what I tried to do with The Housemaid, if I’m being honest. I wanted to make it undeniable. Like my favorite movies, the ones I saw in a theater and keep going back to, are undeniable. Like these martinis were undeniable.”
He studies the empty glasses in front of us, with two lonely twists of lemon sitting at the bottom. “Making a movie is like making a martini. You have your genre — I’m really spitballing here, but go with me — that’s your base alcohol. Your vermouth has to just be a little thing that opens it up. Don’t simply wave the bottle over the top. That’s just a glass of gin. It doesn’t count. There has to be vermouth in there, to open it up and give it some freedom, so it’s not just the genre. The glass is the marketing.”
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And the director? “The director is the twist. You don’t want to be the inflexible director who’s the olive and overtakes the flavor. Then all you taste is the olive. If your gin is good enough, you don’t need it. Don’t be the olive. Be the twist of lemon that just gives it that extra little bit of taste.”
Feig seems lost in pleasantly tipsy thought for a split second. “And for god’s sake, don’t shake the shit out of it.”
