At a press conference for last weekend’s box-office hit “Horrible Bosses,” it was obvious that of the three leading men — Charlie Day, Jason Bateman and Jason Sudeikis — who hatch a plan to off each others’ bosses, it’s Sudeikis who has a history of improv.
Cracking wise about one reporter’s comment that Jason Bateman has never given a bad performance (“We gotta get you a Netflix account then”) and Jennifer Aniston’s ubiquity (“That’s how I know you! You were on ‘Friends’!”) the “Saturday Night Live” cast member is always quick with a comeback — even if “Bosses” itself wasn’t improvised at all.
“Improvisation for me is like the camera’s rolling and we don’t know where we’re going and let’s just waste people’s time and money,” Sudeikis says. “That’s not what happens. All three writers laid out a tremendous framework and we sort of, at the beginning of the day, Charlie, Jason and I — and [director Seth Gordon] — would talk about the scene and we’d develop a different rhythm.”
A picture will last longer
Playing a man who loves his job, except for his new completely inept boss (played by an unrecognizable Colin Farrell), Sudeikis’ character also falls into the trap of Charlie Day’s man-eating boss, played by Jennifer Aniston. When asked to describe how the off-camera scene with her might’ve looked, Sudeikis is more than helpful.
“Here’s how it went down,” he says grabbing a pen and a piece of paper, about to sketch out an illustration. “These are stick figures. It’s going to be very crude. Assuming that all our sex organs are in the same position as other people’s, you’ve probably seen what it was before and I probably just held on for dear life.”
