Why Him? cast on why James Franco's character is actually a great boyfriend

It’s time to meet the boyfriend in Why Him? (out in theaters now), a comedy that centers on a mild-mannered father, Ned (Bryan Cranston), who doesn’t exactly warm up to his daughter Stephanie’s (Zoey Deutch) outrageous, tech-billionaire beau, Laird (James Franco) — and things only get worse when Ned hears that Laird plans to propose.

The film is directed by John Hamburg from a script he wrote with Ian Helfer, and also stars Megan Mullally as Ned’s wife and Stephanie’s mother, Barb, and Griffin Gluck as Ned and Barb’s son and Stephanie’s brother, Scotty. EW spoke with Hamburg, Franco, Mullally, and Deutch on set in March, where they discussed the idea for the film, the one-sided feud at the center of it, its sense of humor, and more.

Read on for that, and for Cranston’s take on the film, head here.

On the idea for the film

JOHN HAMBURG: There was a previous script and I liked the kernel of the idea in it. It just came from the idea that even myself in my mid-40s, sometimes I feel like a kid and sometimes I feel like the establishment, so that conflict between [Bryan’s character] whose life has been working, and suddenly the world’s changed and he hasn’t wanted to let go of things that aren’t working anymore. He’s holding on for dear life and it feels like the kids are taking over the world, with obvious examples of Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. It feels like that’s part of the culture now. Those are the guys at the Sun Valley [media and tech] conference. They’re the new establishment and that dialectic felt like really interesting material for a movie.

Then, I’m a parent of quite a young daughter, but the idea of feeling like you’re losing your daughter. My daughter’s only 4, so I have a ways to go before some of the nightmares that Bryan’s character endures in this movie, but it’s the idea that you want to hold onto your kids as kids and you have to at some point accept that they’re their own people and they’re grown-ups and they’re going to make whatever choices they’re going to make and you have to support them, and that felt like a real grounded emotional idea to base a movie in.

On Cranston and Franco’s working relationship

HAMBURG: [Bryan and James], I feel that they have that classic comedy pairing where they’re two of the most opposite people you could put together, which is why I wanted them in this movie, and yet they play off each other so well. They’re very different kinds of actors, but that’s the story. They’re different people in this movie. Ned is very put together, everything has its purpose and he’s well spoken, and Laird is the complete opposite, says whatever’s on his mind, so when they work together it just creates this tension and comedic spark, and they’re both super experienced, technically amazing actors.

JAMES FRANCO: It’s really easy to work with somebody that you look up to, especially when you’re playing a part that looks up to his part. [It’s] sort of similar in like Milk with Sean Penn, where I played Sean’s lover and boyfriend; the character loved him and I admire Sean so much. It was kind of easy to translate that admiration into the character’s emotions, and it’s sort of similar here.

He is the nicest guy and obviously so talented. We’d been talking about this movie for a long time. I remember [Bryan and I] first talked about it backstage during the last episode of The Colbert Report. John had asked us to do it and we were like, “What do you think? Maybe we should do it together.” Since then, I directed two of my own movies before we started this one and I asked Bryan to do parts in them and he was so gracious and did them.

And the dynamic between their feuding characters

HAMBURG: I like movies about gray areas, so most of the movies I’ve written and/or directed, there’s no villains. It’s kind of like everyone’s okay, their heart is in the right place, they just don’t know how to work it out. So this one, Ned feels threatened from the get-go by Laird, but Laird just wants to love this guy. The problem is Laird doesn’t know how to behave. He’s never had a family, so it’s like he was raised by wolves basically and Ned feels threatened and doesn’t want this guy in his life.

Eventually it is like, what are you doing? His wife is like, you’re at war with this guy, he’s not fighting. Ned has to realize that, but Laird also does some messed up things. He doesn’t do anything in an arched way. He just does it because he doesn’t know better. He’s probably not around parental figures that much. That’s where the comedy comes from, some of it on his side. He has no filter, and when you have a guy with no filter whose heart is in the right place I think you can buy yourself a lot because he can say anything and it can be quite shocking, but hopefully you keep the heart because he’s a decent human being underneath it all.

FRANCO: [This] movie’s called Why Him? meaning why did his daughter choose me to be with and suggests that I’m supposed to be repellant to Bryan’s character, but the trick of it is is my guy actually isn’t that. [He’s] actually a pretty good guy at heart, and he’s actually really great for [Ned’s] daughter, but we needed to set it up in such a way that even my good intentions are misread by Bryan’s character. I guess for my character’s arc, he’s really trying to please everybody. It’s just that he goes about it the wrong way, and so finally at the end, he kind of wakes up and realizes maybe he doesn’t have to try so hard.

On where Stephanie and Barb are at

ZOEY DEUTCH: Stephanie invites her family to come and visit her — she goes to Stanford — for the Christmas break, and ultimately to meet her new boyfriend. All hell breaks loose in this one-sided war of my father against my boyfriend. My boyfriend’s not really engaged at all. It’s just my dad not accepting the fact that this guy is in my life, so Stephanie falls right smack-dab in the middle. I think like anybody in real life, you try different tactics [to handle the situation]. You’re just constantly trying to say the right thing, trying to do the right thing, trying to please everyone, ultimately just trying to make everybody happy, which never works out.

I think she’s hesitant [about telling her family about the relationship] because she knows he comes off a little strong and she knows that he is somebody [who doesn’t have a] filter, there’s no facade. He’s exactly who he is, and she’s wary that they’re not going to immediately accept him, but knows that if they give him a chance they’ll see he’s this really great, honest, and generous man, but it takes a turn for the worse. She thinks that if they meet him in person rather than explain him or meet him on Skype or something that it’s a better option.

[She doesn’t want to tell them how long they’ve been dating] because then she has to explain why she hasn’t told them for this long. It just became bigger than she wanted it to become in terms of the lie and it was easier to keep going with it than be like, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you for this entire year that I’ve been with this guy. She doesn’t want to hurt their feelings and she has a very close relationship with her father and to hide this from him would really pain him.

MEGAN MULLALLY: I think when we first arrive we’re feeling protective of our daughter, Stephanie. We arrive in Palo Alto to this big, modern mansion and we’re pretty overwhelmed.We’re a little freaked out because we meet Laird and he’s a freak and we don’t know what to think or do and one bomb after the next keeps getting dropped. We keep finding out more and more. He’s had her face tattooed on his chest, he’s got our family Christmas card tattooed on his back. He’s completely inappropriate and dropping the F-bomb right and left and we’ve got a 15-year-old son with us and we are not big users of that language.

We find out they’re living together, we find out all of these things. It’s all a big surprise. I think that Ned and Barb are different in the sense that Ned is a little more conservative and buttoned up and Barb is conservative and Midwest in her own way, but at the same time she’s sort of an artist. She’s a photographer and she was more the wild one in college and so it’s a case of opposites attracting, but within more of a microcosm. As the movie goes on, Barb blossoms a little bit and comes out of her shell. At a certain point Barb has a conversation with Laird and she realizes that he’s actually not a bad guy, that he’s a pretty good guy and she develops a certain fondness for him and then tries to nudge Ned in that direction.

On the film’s sense of humor

DEUTCH: It’s not forcing jokes down your throat, I don’t think. There’s been a lot of find-it-in-the moment sort of stuff that’s come about.

MULLALLY: I’m sure you’ve seen I Love You Man. I actually was a huge fan of that movie, and I love John’s movies because the humor comes out of the characters and the situations, but at the same time he’s cast it very well so we’ve had some people in, like for the party sequence we had Andrew Rannells and Adam DeVine, and Keegan-Michael Key is playing Laird’s butler for lack of a better term and he’s killing it. There are a lot of scenes where we’ve done quite a bit of improvisation, so it’s hard to say because the tone of the movie is very real, but at the same time I think there’s going to be some pretty state-of-the-art comedy happening. Not necessarily on my part, but some of the other actors.

HAMBURG: There’s insane moments of comedy…You can’t have every moment be a huge, big, explosive laugh scene, but [the] scenes where it’s a little more subtle, it’s about behavior and looks between characters and little, subtle things that I’m looking for when I’m directing that might actually be as funny as some of the big things. It’s more grounded in everyday life and so this is about these normal people from the Midwest entering James Franco’s character’s world. It’s like The Wizard of Oz. They’re in this alternate universe and they don’t know what they’re doing there and I’m trying to capture that tension.