Josh Duhamel tried to change some aspects of his character in “Shotgun Wedding.”
“I just felt like he was so soft. You know, he was a groomzilla. He was afraid of heights. He lost his job. He didn’t feel very desirable, and I wanted to put him up a bit, but they said trust me your butch enough, just go with it,” he said. “Have fun, find the humor in it, and I did.”
Duhamel plays half of the starring duo — the groom Tom Fowler — who obsesses over details of his destination wedding to Darcy Rivera (Jennifer Lopez).
“For me, the groomzilla part was fun because I hadn’t seen that before. It is certainly not something that I personally would do. I go into a wedding and I’m like,’ You know what, it’s never going to be perfect. Be in the moment and let’s just have a great time. Because it’s gonna go by like that,’” he said. “And [Tom] was very much focused on every detail being perfect and ‘If we have a perfect wedding, we’re gonna have a perfect marriage and life is going to be perfect.’ It just doesn’t work out that way, and it was fun to explore all of that and to get into the obsessiveness of what it would feel like to actually plan a wedding down to every single detail.”
On the big day, pirates interfere with the carefully planned ceremony, taking the wedding guests hostage while the couple try to ground themselves before walking down the aisle.
“The real fun that I had on this was more the physical comedy side of it because it was a broad comedy in a lot of ways, and that to me is fun. You get a chance to really physicalize things and you get to heighten them in some ways,” the actor told TheWrap. “With Jason [Moore], who came from the theater — he was a theater director first — and Jennifer just being gamed to make this thing really fun and active and physical. That to me is what I really love about what I get to do for a living is finding the life inside of a scene on the page.”
Duhamel said with Jennifer Coolidge as another highlight of the filmmaking process. Coolidge plays Tom’s mother Carol, who isn’t afraid to start belting out “I’ll Be” by Edwin McCain or wield a machine gun if it means her baby boy gets to have his big day.
“I just love her. I really do. She’s such an amazing and interesting and unique artist, and a really fun, sweetheart of a woman. I’ll never forget how her process as an actress is so different than anything I’d seen,” he said. “Usually you know, when they say action, person goes, does their thing in the scene, they say cut and the scene’s over. “
“You could never really tell when she was on and when she wasn’t. Everything feels like it’s sort of intentional or unintentional,” he added. That’s part of the beauty of her work is, there’s a spontaneity about it that you can’t tell if she’s meant to do that or not. And I’ll never forget that about working with Jennifer.”
“Shotgun Wedding” is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.