Having never seen “The Big Bang Theory,” my first awareness of the comedy of Melissa Rauch (who plays Bernadette Rostenkowski on the series) was hearing about her one-woman show “The Miss Education of Jenna Bush,” in which she poked fun at the former president’s daughter’s many misadventures. She also popped up for a brief stint on “True Blood” right around the time she was beginning her run on “Big Bang Theory.” But it wasn’t until last year’s Sundance Film Festival that I actually saw Rauch’s work for myself in THE BRONZE, in which she plays Hope, a former gymnast who won a bronze metal 10 years earlier and has been milking the fame it brought her for all that its worth ever since.
Hope is a horrible person, even to her supportive and overly forgiving father (Gary Cole) and a man who really likes her (Thomas Middleditch). She’s forced to help out a budding young gymnast (Haley Lu Richardson) make it to a finals competition, and the process ends up making her a more tolerable person. Rauch co-wrote the film with her husband Winston Rauch, and with Hope they have dared to create a character that is undeniably unlikeable, but you can’t help but root for her be snap out of her bitterness and find her heart and passion for the practice again.
I sat down recently with Rauch in Chicago, who will next be heard as a voice in the summer animated film ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE. She might be one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, and it was a real treat chatting with her. So please enjoy my sit down with Melissa Rauch…
Melissa Rauch: How are you doing?
Capone: Good. I have to admit, I don’t watch “The Big Bang Theory,” so this film was my first time exposed to any of your work.
MR: Oh, okay! Do you hate me? [laughs]
Capone: No, no. I actually saw it at Sundance last year and watched it again recently. So in that time, I’ve gotten to know other things you’ve done, and now I’m aware that this role is really far afield from the things that people know you for. Was that the idea, to push yourself a little bit and try something that nobody has seen you do before as an artist and a writer?
MR: As an actor, there’s always that part of you that wants to challenge yourself and have the opportunity to do other roles. I knew that if this script wasn’t written by me, I don’t know that it would be a part that I would have been given the opportunity to play. It originally came from us wanting to tell this story. It was a story that we were excited to dive into. We knew that we wanted to write it for me, but we’ve written other things that I would be willing to give to another actor, and this was something that, even when we were halfway through I knew I couldn’t give this up.
It started to become a part of me, and when we started sending it out to producers, there was that question of we had interest. There were some people who wanted to make it, but there was a question of should we put another actor in it who can bring more box office? And I don’t have a proven track record in film as the lead of a movie, so I decided, and Winston my husband who wrote it with me, we’re like, “We’re going to ROCKY this”—Stallone and what he did with ROCKY. So we kept on saying “We’re Stallone-ing it!”
Capone: Let’s talk about the creation of the character. First of all, the idea of having her be this woman who peaked early as a gymnast. Where did that idea come from? That’s almost the cruelest fate is for someone to realize, “I’m never going to have a life better than I did when I was 17.”
MR: Yeah. The injury was really paramount in that story, because it’s not that she had a good run and that’s the end of it and now she has to move on. It’s that the injury cut her dream short, so that’s something that we really wanted to build the story upon—what happens when you’re disconnected with your purpose? For me, there have been times in my career, although not because of an injury, where you’re not given the opportunity to do what you love. So when I was on unemployment or waiting tables looking for my next job, those were always times I was really sad. It’s why I also love writing, because it was always something I felt I could control a little bit of, even if what I was writing was going up in the back of laundry mats.
So that was the theme that we wanted to focus on. For Hope, not only does she has this injury and can’t compete, she’s also not the type of person that can just reset and say, “Okay, I’m going to coach now,” whereas so many athletes have been able to do that and go on to inspire thousands of athletes after that. But for Hope, she’s been enabled by her father her whole life. The circumstances of her life are such that she won’t reset. For her, it’s game over, and she does feel that the best is behind her, which is why she’s trying to engage in every hedonistic pleasure she possibly can, to get that high again.
Capone: Did you originally conceive of her someone that was that vulgar and that intent on doing the most awful things to herself and others? Was that always part of her personality?
MR: At first, we knew that we had the story, we knew that she was sad, and depressed, and angry. The vulgarity and everything came really as we were writing, and it was evolving because we realized this character has been told to act a certain way, to look a certain way, to eat a certain way, to dress a certain way—well, the dressing she really enjoys what she wears. But really she’s been told what to do her whole life, and now that she feels that she’s been robbed of this dream, she’s like, “I’m don’t have to listen to this anymore. I’m going to rebel against everything. I’m now going to eat whatever I want, I’m going to wear this outfit that makes me feel great, and I’m going to say whatever the F I want because I don’t have endorsements right now that are coming after me that I have to just be a perfect little girl for.”
Capone: Is it liberating to be able to just write it down and go, “Yeah, why not?”
MR: Yeah, it’s really fun, and some of the language that we used were words that we had both never used in our vernacular, so it was also just fun constructing new bits of foul language.
Capone: There are a few that seem like original creations here.
MR: [laughs] Yes, there are. There were some brainstorming sessions like, “Oh, that’s a good one.”
Capone: At the same time, there does come a certain point where we realize what we’re seeing here is a profile of someone who is trapped by a type of fame. That is the sad part. At some point, it might be in different places of the movie, but people are going to feel a little bad for her.
MR: Thank you.
Capone: The other part of her that I love, of course, is the accent. Where did that come in?
MR: That we didn’t really know when we were writing it. I knew in the back of my head, because sometimes when we write, I’ll improvise some dialogue, it was sort of there. My college roommate was from a town not too far from Amherst, and she had this very thick Ohio accent. I remember the second week of school she said, “I’m going to be absent [pronounced with a heavy emphasis on the “aaaaay”] this week.” And I had a heavy Jersey accent, so we both thought the other sounded very weird. And we knew we wanted to set it in the middle of the country. So many wonderful gymnasts have come from the Midwest. So that was important to us. And then the accent. I worked with a dialect coach leading up to the shooting of the movie, and when we got to Amherst I did some work around town. I was like, “Does everyone really talk like that?” and to varying degrees, everyone did.
Capone: I’m sure this is the question you’re getting the most, but we have to talk about the sex scene. I remember watching the film at Sundance, and suddenly that scene was upon us and I was like, “What is that?” First of all, how did that read in the script? And then second, I’m guessing that isn’t you in most of those scenes, but who’s doing that and how did you choreograph it? That seems like it would take a whole day just to shoot. I’m guessing you didn’t have that many days.
MR: We didn’t. We shot for 22 days on a shoestring budget, so that was half of one of our days. Sometimes, we had one take of a scene; we never did more than three takes. So in the original outline, we outline every script we do intensely before we actually start writing the script, and the sex scene wasn’t in the outline originally. We knew they would get together at that point in the script, but that wasn’t in our original notes. So then we were plugging in the dialogue, Winston and I were sitting across each other with our computers, and we just looked at each other and there was this look in each others’ eye. We were like, “Of course. These are two world-class gymnasts. This is what would happen.” So we wrote the most crazy, epic gymnastics sex scene ever in bold and underlined with a lot of explanation points and we sort of bullet pointed what we wanted to see, which could also read like a porn script.
Then we met with Brian Buckley, our director, who came on board and is an absolute genius; we spoke about what it would be, then we had a gymnastics coordinator Christina Basket who was an elite gymnast herself, and she choreographed not only our sex scene, but also all the gymnastics in the movie. She did a dry run, no pun intended, of the scene with two gymnasts, and it looked like a sex ballet. And then I had a body double, a Cirque du Soleil performer and she was amazing. And Sebastian [Stan, who plays the other person in the scene], he was like, “I want to do as much of my own stunts as much as possible.” So he learned the whole thing and he was amazing, so everyone gets to see a lot of Sebastian. He also had a stunt double as well for some of the more technically gymnastic moments in that scene.
Capone: Even the fact that I’ve seen him twice, I’m still not exactly sure what I can see and what I can’t see in that scene, because the lighting is so perfect. It’s actually kind of funny.
MR: Thank you. Yeah, our director and our cinematographer did such an amazing job with that lighting, and we did have body doubles, and they lit it so perfectly.
Capone: When I saw the film originally I didn’t realize Mark and Jay Duplass were producers on it. At what point did they become involved, and what do they bring to the table for you?
MR: So, when we wrote this script and were sending out to producers, they were our dream producers that we wanted to go with, and we always loved their movies, so it was sent to their production company and their executive read it, and we met with her. It was just a mutual love. We just absolutely fell in love with her, and she totally got the script. She didn’t want to water it down. She wanted to keep it intact. She brought it to Mark and Jay, and they came on board and they greenlit it, and they were supportive and wonderful. They’re obviously the masters of indie film making, and Stephanie is just one of the most hard-working, tenacious people in this business. From then, we got our director and then finally got our financing, which was tough. With all indie film, it’s tough to get off the ground. We had stuff on credit cards until the night before we started shooting, waiting for the financing to come in.
Capone: I think that week at Sundance, I saw four films they produced.
MR: Yeah, they had a lot there that year.
Capone: When you create a character like Hope, you have to realize that there might be some people that come out of this movie never liking her. Is it more important to like her or to understand her?
MR: I think it’s more important to understand her. I think that the un-likability factor is interesting. I think there is a bit of resistance to unlikable female characters, more so than there are to male characters. I think that there are tons of male antiheroes over the years that have been highly unlikable, but you do end up liking them and understanding them at the end.
I think we’ve made strides towards seeing more unlikable female characters on screen, but I think that showing women who are layered and complex…there are so many great roles recently with women playing these characters that are raw and don’t apologize for who they are. I’ve always been drawn to those roles. Even as way back as Bette Davis in ALL ABOUT EVE—there’s a real anger and bitterness there. You look at that movie, she’s not the most likable. I think we’ve moved away from that, but it’s coming back around.
Capone: I’ll admit, the person I disliked the most was her dad, only because he’s such a horrible enabler. He lets her get away with anything. It’s like, “Come on, man. Stop being a punching bad.” He’s frustrating.
MR: Yes. It’s so true. He’s reading that [parenting] book at the beginning because he’s like, “It’s too late. It’s too late.”
Capone: That’s right. Going back to writing for a second. You’ve written before with your one-woman show. Does that flex a different muscle for you creatively to be able to actually be a part of the creation of something you play?
MR: Definitely. The “Miseducation of Jenna Bush” I did right after college. It was what I used at the time to create work for myself. I was not even getting commercials at the time. I was looking for anything I could do, so we used that to get me some momentum. Also, there’s so little control in this business. You’re at the mercy of whoever will hire you. So writing was not only an outlet creatively, and it makes me happy to do it, but it also was something that I felt, “Well if someone else isn’t going to give me the opportunity to do it, let’s see what I can create for myself so that I’m not cut off, as Hope is, from that passion.”
Capone: In the last year since the film played at Sundance, have you written anything else?
MR: Yes. Winston and I are working on a new script, and we also have a pilot that we just sold to HBO called “The Troop,” which is about a Girl Scout troop. They were the best Girl Scout troop at 13, and now they reconvene in their 30s to help fix their majorly messed up lives.
Capone: Well, congratulations on this. Best of luck with it.
MR: Thank you so much. Thanks for watching it twice. That’s so nice of you.
Capone: I felt like I probably needed to. Has it changed at all since Sundance?
MR: It has. Yeah, it’s about 10-15 minutes shorter, and we completed her arc more at the end. It was in the original script, that end beat with her at the mall. That wasn’t in the original Sundance cut. That little moment, and then we changed the opening a little bit as well. A couple of things here and there.
