Set Visit: The Night Before With Anthony Mackie, Seth Rogen & Joseph Gordon-Levitt By Max Evry
August 18, 2015
“We definitely went full Christmas, no halfway,” insists Anthony Mackie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Hurt Locker, Pain & Gain) of the new holiday comedy The Night Before in which he co-stars with Seth Rogen (Neighbors, Knocked Up, Superbad) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Looper, Don Jon, The Dark Knight Rises). The film is a reunion between the latter two actors and writer/director Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies, The Wackness) who made the cancer comedy 50/50.
“He came to me and Evan [Goldberg] as producers and said he had an idea for a Christmas movie,” Rogen says of Levine. “We thought, ‘That’s weird,’ then he explained his vision and reminded us of all the Christmas movies we liked growing up and all the nostalgia you get to play with. There kind of is a void of Christmas movies aimed at our generation and the kind of movie people like us want to go see. It’s Levine’s idea, then Joe came aboard.”
“There’s three buddies who’ve been friends since high school and have this tradition to have a big night out on Christmas Eve that’s rooted in my character Ethan losing both his parents near Christmas ten years prior,” explains Gordon-Levitt of The Night Before’s plot. “He’s alone on Christmas so his two best friends come and hang out, and that inadvertently begins a tradition of a big night out on Christmas. Now it’s ten years later and they’ve been doing this every year and it’s ending because one’s about to have a baby [Rogen], one has become very successful in his career as a professional football player [Mackie] and one doesn’t want it to end. (laughs)”
“It just seemed like a very fertile thing to explore for a one-crazy-night movie,” says Levine. “I really love Christmas movies in general, and I always like taking a genre and then being able to do things with it while having that shorthand with the audience.”
We arrive at Stage 10 of Steiner Studios in Brooklyn in September of 2014 for our set visit to what is, at this time, an untitled Christmas comedy going by the production title “X-Mas” (designed like an X-Men logo).
Inside the sound stage there is a toy store set not unlike FAO Schwartz with a greenscreen behind it where the windows would be. Like the classic Big, Rogen and Gordon-Levitt are rehearsing on the giant piano only instead of “Heart and Soul” or “Chopsticks” they’re playing Kanye West’s “Runaway.” Gordon-Levitt can actually play piano, but Rogen needs to learn the song with special tape marking the keys for his feet to play.
As Seth and Joe walk into the scene for a take Seth is, in typical Rogen fashion, wearing an ugly Christmas sweater with a big Star of David on it. The two actors throw their jackets aside, give each other a nod of recognition and begin playing “Runaway.” Anthony Mackie runs into the scene riding a stuffed horse and shouting into a megaphone, “Who got ya/who got ya/who got ya!” During the first take Mackie trips and falls on the floor, making everyone crack up.
“Take 2! Reset!” Mackie yells.
Rogen has a big, long bushy beard for this movie. Mackie is wearing a black Santa Claus sweater. By the sixth take the extras are waving their hands in the air to the song, and even Levine is moving to the magic from the monitors at video village.
“Alright, Anthony, let’s do one without the horse,” Levine says.
This is day 34 of a 35-day shoot before they return for four more days of select New York City location shooting in January, including scenes at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
“Everybody on the set is really easygoing,” Mackie insists. “There’s no egos or ridiculousness, which you usually don’t find when there’s ‘stars’ on set. Usually everybody’s like, ‘Well my trailer’s bigger,’ or ‘My girlfriend’s coming today,’ ‘Why’s he getting that?’ You don’t find that on this set. Even in the movie the three of us are so vastly different that it works really good together. Everything’s all good because they’re not assholes.”
“It’s rooted in real emotion and a lot of the stuff you would find in these Christmas movies,” adds Rogen. “It was like, ‘Are we gonna fully embrace the idea of an orphan and all this stuff?’ Yeah! It’s a Christmas movie, let’s do it as best we can and try to get away with ridiculous stuff because there’s a real, actual emotional core.
“What I like is it’s not just a comedy of people talking and saying funny things,” says Gordon-Levitt. “It’s really visual, and a feast for the eyes as well.”
“There’s physical fighting, car chases, lots of psychedelic sequences,” enthuses Rogen. “Anthony Mackie’s a Marvel star, we can’t not use that. (laughs)”
“I’m more of a love machine than anything else,” Mackie elaborates. “Basically my character’s been an athlete for 15-years at this point and he’s finally found fame, so he’s really into being famous which, if you go out in New York you see a lot of these guys. ‘Oh my God! I’m famous not so I’m gonna use it for everything I can.’ He’s just a fame whore.”
That famous charm translates to an already edited scene Levine plays for us where Mackie begins hitting on an attractive young woman standing on the sidewalk outside a party, as played by Ilana Glazer of “Broad City” fame.
Mackie: Hey! I’m Chris! Wanted to introduce myself, just wondering what a beautiful young lady like you is doing standing out here all alone on Christmas?
Glazer: I’m not alone, I’m just waiting for some friends.
Mackie: Well your friends shouldn’t have you waiting because a lady who looks like you shouldn’t have to wait. You give them a call?
Glazer: Nope, I don’t do phones.
Mackie: You wanna use my phone?
Glazer: No, I don’t have a phone.
Mackie: Like you don’t posess a phone?
Glazer: Yeah, I don’t engage in the phone scene?
Mackie: That’s dope. Wait, so how do you call people?
Glazer: I don’t call people.
Mackie: So how do you look shit up?
Glazer: I… don’t care.
Mackie: It’s cold out here, you wanna come inside and get a beverage?
Glazer: Yeah, I’ll take anything.
Mackie: So let me get you some sort of beverage, there’s a buffet inside, I’ll pay for you to eat all the…
Glazer: There’s a buffet inside?
Mackie: Yeah.
Glazer: Do you have to pay to get in?
Mackie: Don’t worry about it!
“She’s great,” says Mackie of Glazer. “She has a ridiculousness about her, it kinda makes it fun. She does it with such ease and she has the ability to make it seem like natural behavior, that’s what makes it so unique to me. Anybody else would do it and they’d be like, ‘Oh they’re being stupid,’ she does it and you’re like, ‘You really act like that, huh?’ It makes you wanna go further as an actor.”
Mackie revealed exactly how much of the filming was geared towards the improv background Rogen is famous for.
“I think it’s 50/50,” laughs Mackie making a pun on Levine’s previous film. “We do one take where we stick to the script and then we venture off and just find different ideas once we get into it. The more we explore on camera the more we find different things in different characters.”
Adds Rogen, “Meanwhile the guys, Evan, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir are writing alt jokes and are constantly feeding us stuff so it’s not like we’re just coming up with one-liners. There’s many comedy writers on set providing for us.”
Another extended scene we see takes place at a bar between a high-on-cocaine Rogen and Mindy Kaling (“The Mindy Project”), with Rogen’s Isaac talking a mile-a-minute.
Kaling: You’re talking so fast you sound like an auctioneer!
Rogen: Yeah, well that’s funny… SOLD! (laughs) Sorry, I don’t mean to scare you I just like saying SOLD! You shouldn’t have said it now it’s all I can think about. But yeah, people always say I’m a little introverted, that I should talk more, let people in let people in let people in so now I’m letting people in and it feels good. You wanna drink?
His nose bleeding profusely, Rogen gets her a drink with his blood in it. “This is good. It tastes like pennies or something,” Kaling remarks. After a brief exchange she puts two-and-two together.
Kaling: Your nose is bleeding! Do you not feel that? Did you fucking bleed in my drink? You fucking bled in my drink, Isaac! You’re not cool enough to do cocaine!”
Kaling accidentally takes Rogen’s phone before exiting the scene, no doubt a complication that will become pressing later.
“Even though the movie is grounded there are magical elements that fit right into it because it’s a Christmas movie,” explains Levine. “The reason they want to go to the party, which they think is going to be the best party ever but throughout the course of the night they think it’s going to solve all their problems. I’m not gonna say it’s a false goal but it’s not everything they were hoping, but it is a legendary party and the way you get into it is through a scavenger hunt. It becomes almost an adventure movie trying to get to this party.”
“Like most Jews in their 30’s my character is sort of benign towards Christmas at this point and just acknowledges that to some people it’s a big deal,” says Rogen. “I think he views it through our tradition with one another, and my guy’s about to have a kid and my wife in the movie is not Jewish. Jillian Bell plays my wife, so that’s kind of an element as well, that we’re going to start our own family tradition in the coming years. There’s some friction at the beginning, there’s a scene where I’m explaining to her two Christian nieces what a Jew is, inbreeding, why we all look the same, why we all have curly hair. (laughs)”
Although Mackie is known for his dramatic and action movie chops, getting to join Rogen and company in The Night Before will be a departure for him in a fully comedic role.
“I have a very comedic family,” says the Juilliard-trained Mackie of his qualifications. “I’ve always liked to have fun. Me and my friends always joke around, I don’t take things too seriously, so it’s kind of second nature to me. When people take things seriously I make fun of them.”
All three of the lead actors share a bond that makes their onscreen friendship seem very real. Levine has helped facilitate that, especially since he has based his script on he and his friends’ own Christmas antics.
“In the Christmas genre you can fuck with it tonally,” Levine says. “It can be bittersweet, it can be kinda sad sometimes, but it always ends up really happy. So for this I watched ‘Home Alone,’ ‘Eyes Wide Shut’… you would not think of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ as a Christmas movie, nor would you think of it as a tonal reference for a movie like this. I always grab from different places, but Christmas movies are a time of existential exploration. The other cool thing about it is ‘How do you grow up with your friends?’ The dynamic becomes different when one is successful and the other is not. The allegory of Christmas and leaving childhood behind was very salient for this story.”
Sony Pictures will release The Night Before on November 25.
