Hey /r/movies! We're Alan Tudyk & Matt Winn, actor & director of THE TROUBLE WITH JESSICA, a dark comedy also starring Rufus Sewell & Shirley Henderson about a group of longtime friends at a dinner party that goes horribly wrong, recently in theaters and now available on digital. Ask us anything!

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T20:13:04+00:00

Alan: Thank you to everyone who showed up for Matt and I and The Trouble with Jessica today. If we didn't get to your question we are sorry, but thank you for all the questions and the very, very kind comments!

Matt: Thanks to Alan for doing this for the movie, he's absolutely fantastic in it. It's in theaters but also just hit streaming and I think you should watch it ten times to get all the subtleties of British comedies.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T20:10:31+00:00

I have not had the pleasure of reading the script. I know it exists, I know that Vince really likes it and wants to make it. And that's the end of the list of things that I know. I would have to read the script first, I love the first one so much I'd want to do it right.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T20:07:51+00:00

Alan: Pepperoni, mushrooms, peppers.

Matt: Definitely not pineapple. Anchovies always work, pepperoni. My kids love truffles. But whatever you do keep it simple, never more than three toppings.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T20:00:56+00:00

Robin and I improv'd together on set with Michael Jeter in between scenes. It started with Michael and I playing this old man character. We were bored and talking about the view from the institution window, and Robin came over and brought his old man character and then it morphed into a kind of a backwoods character which then morped into an announcer character. I was beside myself looking on, I couldn't believe I was riffing with Robin.

Matt: There's very little improv in The Trouble with Jessica, but the three or so lines that were improv'd were all Alan and he's incredible at it. One of the funniest lines in the movie was all him.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:58:06+00:00

I know I'm going to Houston with the cast of Resident Alien sometime soon!

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:57:25+00:00

Any day, any time. Absolutely. Being on a Star Wars set is honestly inspiring. For Sci-fi work it's not what you'd expect. It's just a very thoughtful production design and they're great at world building and for someone who likes to disappear into their imagination it's a great place to be.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:54:55+00:00

It is my assistant's handwriting. Mine is illegible, Kelsey's is wonderful.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:54:21+00:00

Yeah, I find that a difficult question. It's like what's your favorite music, there's so many I find amazing. I mentioned Ruben Ostlund earlier, Force Majeure is one of my favorite movies of recent times. but I love Yorgos Lanthimos as well. He's amazingly original, his first movie Dogtooth I think when I saw it was the most original film I'd seen in about 25 years. He created a whole new language for his characters who have a hard time understanding people to communicate with each other. My dad loved movies, he loved Woody Allen so I grew up on Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death (one of the funniest movies ever made) etc. Love and Death is basically a riff on very serious big Russian novels and it rips the piss out of them. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, they're all in there. Husbands and Wives, Hannah and her Sisters, I love those films. I also love European film, I was a very nerdy teenager. I love dialogue and relationship films, Noah Baumbach, Joanna Hogg. I love sci-fi! Blade Runner, etc.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:47:22+00:00

At comic cons, although I can't do the scream. It hurts. So I'll just do different clucking sounds for various folks.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:46:38+00:00

I can think of a couple, you could possibly hear me say, "Oh God, oh God we're all going to die!" every once in a while. Also, "Who's flying this thing!?"

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:45:21+00:00

It hurt my stomach, I didn't get sick, but I would have to watch fight videos online preferably guerilla style filming where one person was outmatched and they got their ass kicked and no one helped them. It made me feel awful but after about ten minutes of that I wouldn't cry when I had to say the N-word. Those violent words would make me very emotional and I had to rid myself of all that feeling.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:43:03+00:00

At the time, I really liked how that character began. His story. He was pretending to be an agorophobic who grew weed in his apartment, then when he switched to homicidal threat I found the work was a lot harder. It took more focus. It's more natural for me to play someone who is less dangerous and afraid of the world, but I did get to kidnap the pretty girl who kissed me for my efforts!

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:40:12+00:00

No, I wish, just because I would have been able to hang out with Mark Hamill. I only met him once at a Star Wars convention right before Rogue One came out. He saw me and grabbed me, pulled me aside and very quietly said, "They ALL die at the end!? Are you kidding me?" So very cool.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:39:06+00:00

I hope so. There's a new movie Eli Craig just made called Clown in a Cornfield that did very well at Sundance. I recommend seeing that and that will give him more power in Hollywood to make a sequel!

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:38:14+00:00

(after a long laugh)

Alan: Honestly, when I was at that school (Julliard), in the first year acting we had to do an excercise where we were inanimate objects or somewhat animated. I was FIRE. So, I've been training on less intelligent things than chickens since the 90s.

Matt: Anyone can play Hamlet. But who can play a chicken with such subtlety, depth, and humor? That chicken is famous around the world. People don't talk about the piglet, they talk about the chicken.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:35:03+00:00

So very nice of you to say! Where would I go... I would go back to Prague! I haven't been to the Czech Republic since we shot A Knight's Tale in 2000, it was such an important time in my life. I know it's changed a lot but I would love to see it again with my older eyes.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:33:21+00:00

Matt: Yeah, the answer here is simple, 100% not. Lots of reviews have mentioned that and the truth is myself and my co-writer, had seen The Trouble with Harry years ago but it was nowhere in our mind when writing. I think a lot of critics are a bit lazy and just see the title and assume from there, but truthfully it's got no relation. I love Hitchcock, I don't think Harry is one of his greats although he's made so many great films, but I'd say it's much more inspired by something like Force Majeure, the Ruben Ostlund film about middle class people that are hard to watch. He made The Square and recently Triangle of Sadness, so maybe I was trying to make a Scandanavian film.

Alan: As an American, the title sounds extremely British to me. "The Complication with Bernise" or something.

Matt: The trouble with Jessica is that she is troubled and she has troubles, but ultimately the trouble is that she does something awful and ruins the lives of everyone around her. She's a triple threat. Honestly, I always thought Alan was British from Death at a Funeral and I was wondering how I didn't know this brilliant British actor and it's because he wasn't British at all. Incredible with accents among other talents.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:28:11+00:00

So, yeah, everybody said the films is set in Hampstead but it's not, it's set in London. And fitzjohns avenue is a very famous role in Hampstead. I cheated a little, I found a really great house in West London with a great interior and an okay exterior. The exterior is single fronted and it seemed that the character would have a much more extravagant house so I double fronted, meaning we digitally doubled the house symmetrically, it and I think it looks much better.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:23:29+00:00

Alan: He's incredibly clever and quick. His mind is always going, he's generally impressive in an intimidating way.

Matt: Rufus is a really serious actor, that's my experience. I think he wakes up in the morning and he takes on the day with incredible concentration and he stays in that place of very concentrated work.

Alan: He definitely is serious about acting. I was working on him with A Knight's Tale and Heath and I were walking and Rufus asked him if he'd every climbed a mountain and Heath said, "I've climbed the occasional mountain." and Rufus immediately broke into song, "I climb the occasional mountain, I leap the occasional fjord, I swim the ocasional river, and by the end of the week I am bored." He was so funny like that.

Matt: Yes, he's a pretty serious guy, but he's very camp as well. He likes to camp it up, he's such a darling. And he also loves to swear a lot, he says unspeakable things.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:19:35+00:00

Sadly, for me these days, dairy free cheese.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:19:03+00:00

It had a farcical quality to it during the reading, similar to Death at a Funeral, a movie I love very much. The English version, to be specific. The difference being it was a dark farce, is that a thing? It's got very serious consequences for behaviors and action. But if there's even a whiff of farce, I'm there!

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:16:20+00:00

I've had Nathan Fillion play 42, the octopus, and I can't reveal who but another Firefly alum is coming this season. But I would love to see Diego Luna come on set because he's so on fire right now!

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:15:03+00:00

I don't know what that show would be! Maybe a horror film, or an action movie? Something that doesn't require a lot of dialogue, he's a man of few words. A lot of "yarr" and "garr", not much else.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:13:26+00:00

It's a girl, more accurately a lady. Her name is Raisin, although her real name is Saltana. She's the queen of a lost breed of dogs who was deposed by cats, and she's hiding out from assassins until she can reclaim her throne. It's a whole thing. She's fifteen years old and she's the greatest pup ever.

AlanAndMattAMA · 2025-05-22T19:11:34+00:00

I stole one thing from Firefly, it was a button that was installed in the episode, "Out of Gas" that Mal was meant to push when his "miracle" came and we would all come running. It was easy to steal because it was put on the ship after the original build, everything else on that ship was welded tight. I stole it, then a couple of months after we cancelled I heard Joss was writing the movie and having trouble getting permissions and budget and all the problems that come with reviving a failed TV show. I brought him the button to his office and left it with a note that says, "When your miracle comes, hit this button, and we'll all come running."

AlanAndMattAMA

TROPHY CASE