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No Hard Feelings might be the first R-rated comedy you've seen on the big screen in a while. A genre normally destined for a straight-to-streaming fate, this innuendo-laden, bawdy movie is bucking the trend. "Every filmmaker wants their movie seen in a cinema," director Gene Stupnitsky tells us when we catch up with him at a London hotel. "Sitting in a darkened room with strangers... comedy is like horror in that sense. It's a communal experience." And, on the surface, No Hard Feelings could seem like a horror movie – or, more specifically, a prude's worst nightmare.
Helmed and co-written by Stupnitsky (also known for his work on The Office and Jury Duty), No Hard Feelings stars Jennifer Lawrence as Maddie, a loud and lude Uber driver whose car is repossessed when she fails to pay property tax on her house, inherited from her late mother. Facing bankruptcy and desperate to keep her home, with all the sentimental value it carries, she comes across a Craigslist posting for a car with an unusual catch. The price? Dating a wealthy older couple's socially anxious 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), to bring him out of his shell before he goes to college (or, in his parents' words, "date his brains out").
While the concept may seem outlandish, it was inspired by a real listing on the site spotted by two of the movie's producers, who sent it over to Stupnitsky. "I thought; 'Who's putting out this ad? Who are the parents that are doing this? What's their son like? Why did they think it was a good idea?" he explains. "'Who answers this ad? What's going on in their life?' So I was like, 'this could be very interesting.'"
When it came to inventing the characters, Stupnitsky wrote the role of Maddie specifically with Lawrence in mind. "I've seen interviews with her on the red carpet, and she's very funny. I thought, 'wow, I would love to capture this in a performance.' So it was really that more than any specific movies she's done." A far cry from her most recent roles in veteran drama Causeway and climate change satire Don't Look Up, No Hard Feelings sees Lawrence swap trauma and the apocalypse for rollerskating and full-frontal nudity.
As for Feldman, his experience lies on the Broadway stage as the lead in long-running musical Dear Evan Hansen, with No Hard Feelings being his first major movie role. "I saw his tape and I was like, 'oh, he's really funny.' If an audition is going really well, you go from laughing to praying that they don't screw it up. I was enjoying it, and then I became fearful," Stupnitsky laughs. "He really had the comedy chops. But he also had – I hate the word – gravitas. He could play the emotion, because it's hard to go up against Jennifer Lawrence. You could easily be blown off the screen. He can hold his own. [Lawrence] is a force of nature and he matches her."
Despite the, uh, unconventional circumstances of their meeting, a genuine bond does develop between Percy and Maddie. "She's lost and he's lonely, and they kind of change each other. They need each other," Stupnitsky says. "She has an aversion to intimacy, but she doesn't have any guilt or shame about sex. He wants a friend, he needs a connection, which is kind of the one thing that she can't really give him. It was about the irony of a woman [who's like]; 'You want to have sex? Yeah, fine, no big deal.' And he doesn't, he wants a human connection, and that's something that's not easy for her to do. It's about the battle of wills between these two characters."
Feldman agrees. "The initial friction between the two of them is because she's not somebody who wants to really be seen or known," he explains. "And he really just wants to get to know her as a human being before they move forward with anything, but also just because he is a very caring and thoughtful individual. Because they're so absent from one another's worlds, he's a really safe person for her to open up to."
Providing a backdrop for Maddie and Percy's relationship is a seasonal gentrification of sorts. Maddie was born and raised in Montauk, a coastal resort in Long Island, New York, where she and her friends are being priced out of their hometown by people like Percy's upper-class family, who spend their summers in Montauk at their second home.
Stupnitsky explains that this element of the story stemmed from something he read during the pandemic. "I read an article about Nantucket, where the people who have summer homes were coming there to get out of the cities and emptying out the grocery stores. The locals really did not like it, and so there was this tension – that already existed, because they're dependent on these summer people for making most of their money for the year – and on top of that, these people were using all the other goods and services. So I thought it was really interesting to put [the film] in a resort town and play with it."
Despite this socio-political undertone, the movie is still a comedy, make no mistake – and an R-rated one at that. "It's such a funny movie and that comedy, to me, was coming out of a real emotional truth of the characters," says Feldman. "They find themselves in these crazy situations, but they're real people, and that's why we care so much. That's why they're so funny. Percy, especially, was just so real to me and I felt like I knew him so well. There was nothing that I was like, 'I don't know if I can do that, or might not be ready for that.' I would only ever have to be myself."
Scenes that he may not have felt ready for include being hit by a car with no clothes on and an excruciatingly awkward attempt at a lap dance, but Feldman didn't feel daunted by any of it. "With a script that wasn't as clever or funny, or a director that wasn't as caring, or a set of people that wasn't as professional, it might have been [daunting]," he says. "But every crazy stunt, every weird thing we had to do with our bodies was so funny, or we just knew it had to happen for this journey. So there was never a sense of fear, really as much as like, 'Alright, let's tell this story.'"
No Hard Feelings is in UK cinemas on June 21 and US theaters on June 23. For more viewing inspiration, check out our guide to the year's most exciting movie release dates.
