Cast and Director of ‘Life Partners’ Discuss the Dynamics of Their Characters

Jonathan Graves

On Dec. 5, Leighton Meester and Gillian Jacobs will play best friends in the upcoming film, “Life Partners.” Sasha (Meester) must learn the new boundaries of her relationship with her best friend, Paige (Jacobs) when Paige brings a new man into her life who soon becomes her fiancé, played by Adam Brody, Meester’s husband in real life. In a round table interview, Meester, Jacobs, and Director Susanna Fogel discuss the dynamics on set and the overall maturity of their characters.

Entertainment Voice: What was the most surprising thing about working together?

Gillian Jacobs: I didn’t know Leighton so I didn’t know what to expect. To find a goof-ball weirdo like myself it was a really pleasant surprise.

Leighton Meester: Oh, thanks!

Gillian Jacobs: You’re welcome.

Leighton Meester: A lot in the sense that I didn’t know her and I had never met her so everything was a new surprise. It was like a blind date. Truly. I did really trust that Joni and SF, having met us both, knew what characters we were going to play and thought ‘you guys should hang out.

Entertainment Voice: How did you guys go about creating such great chemistry?

Leighton Meester: We had a hand full of rehearsals and table reads and enough time to establish familiarity with each other. I think we are both just really in love with the story and in love with the characters and wanted to portray the friendship accurately and we did.

Susanna Fogel: Mission accomplished.

Entertainment Voice: I kept waiting for you guys to break out into song but it never happened. Did you guys film any scenes where you were singing?

Leighton Meester: No. I think people secretly want to see a musical all the time.

Entertainment Voice: It was so cool to watch something where it wasn’t about the gay thing and her parents supported her no matter what. But she had this secret life and I almost wonder if she was leading that part of her life secretly as well.

Leighton Meester: I think it’s one of the many colors of a very well rounded character. It’s definitely something that made her who she is and probably gave her a lot of insight into being a nonjudgmental human.

Gillian Jacobs: I find that to be really refreshing. The thing I like most about it is that it has beautifully written characters, it’s a relatable story and it feels like something I haven’t seen on screen before.

Entertainment Voice: Leighton, how was it working with Adam?

Leighton Meester: This is also a topic people like to talk about. Yeah it’s great.

Entertainment Voice: So you didn’t know he was being cast?

Susanna Fogel: We didn’t know. We had this meeting on the books with Leighton and the same time that morning we got a call from Adam’s agency saying that he really wanted to do it. We knew we had this meeting with her so it’s that weird thing when you are a director or writer and you sit down with an actor and you are not meant to let on that you know all her work or know anything about his or her personal life, even though everyone knows everything. So we sat down and after an hour of hanging out and falling in love with her and I think we some how broached the subject that your boyfriend was also reading the script. I think you Leighton said, ‘Yeah, is he doing it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Is he doing it?’ It was a weird moment over French fries. ‘We are still going to hire you but is he doing it?’

Susanna Fogel: We would never have cast Leighton in Gillian’s role. We wanted the roles to be fully developed by the actors and not even be any reference to anything that’s happening in the world. We wanted the actors to be their own characters. We loved them both for those two roles that we decided they would be able to transcend that and if they really did, so that was great.

Entertainment Voice: Leighton, how many mozzarella sticks did you destroy over the course of making the movie?

Leighton Meester: Like a thousand! [Laughter]

Entertainment Voice: While you were writing, was Jack in the Box your go to comfort food?

Susanna Fogel: This isn’t the first time we’ve incorporated Jack in the Box into our writing. We feature Jack in the Box pretty prominently in several episodes of a web-series that we made. It’s THAT much part of the fabric of our routine, so it wasn’t specific to this movie but it is certainly specific to our lives in general.

Entertainment Voice: You should get some sponsorship.

Susanna Fogel: Yeah, I’m trying. [Laughter]

Entertainment Voice: Do you guys have guilty pleasures like that when you get stressed out?

Susanna Fogel: I think I’ve mentioned I like to eat mozzarella sticks when I’m stressed out, happy, creative, not creative, lazy or productive. [Laughter] I really enjoy 90’s music. I was listening to some Roxette today, that’s a really great-underrated band. And, I think anything that’s sort of low brow is ideal so hanging out at the mall, eating crap, watching bad movies, those types of things I really find very important especially in this business. If you’re trying to do anything moderately intelligent you sort of take yourself really seriously and constantly ruminate on pushing yourself to do better, so I think it can be really nice to escape into something that is 20 years younger on the maturity scale of what you should be doing.

Leighton Meester: Yeah, don’t you feel so good at a mall? It’s so nice.

Gillian Jacobs: I do. I do.

Leighton Meester: Like Auntie Anne’s, that pretzel place.

Entertainment Voice: Your characters are a little co-dependent on each other. What was that like exploring that, because I know in our society, co-dependency is looked down upon?

Leighton Meester: I think it feels really good to be at some point in life, with a friend or somebody that you’re working with or whatever. I mean, we do it a lot in this business, you have to trust other people and you have to put yourself in them.

Gillian Jacobs: Well, I think the interesting thing about this movie is that it’s talking about co-dependency in a “friendships sphere” rather than a “romantic sphere.” When I was younger I thought friendships are just completely safe relationships. But they can have some of the same conflicts that romantic ones do and you can be hurt, sometimes in an even more painful way.

Susanna Fogel: Right, one thing that Joni and I really tried to put into the movie was just the idea that, you’re encouraged to take your time in picking a romantic partner. People spend their 20’s and into their 30’s not feeling the same pressure to settle down that maybe they would if they lived in parts of the country where all their friends get married early into their 20’s. The idea is that you still want to form those attachments as you go through these intense life changes and that co-dependency can then set you up to sort of have heartbreak when the friends move on because that’s not a sustainable life thing.

Entertainment Voice: The film is light-hearted in terms of dialogue & conflict resolution, but there are very serious themes presented as well. Did you find that it was a more effective way of storytelling or a more natural way of storytelling by addressing them through humor?

Susanna Fogel: I think that we’ve always deflected everything with humor and will speak with humor about really tragic things. So it’s just the way that we move through the world. When we approached this story, actually we wanted to touch on some pretty sad and poignant emotions, but we wanted to tell it through the lens of two people who use humor the same way we do, as their general coping mechanism. We always feel like, in terms of writing things that are both dramatic and comedic, if the comedy is working and the people are funny and self-aware you can tell some pretty existentially profound or deeply sad stories. And on the other end of things, we think that the best humor is the humor that rooted in pain and suffering. I know you just said the movie is lighthearted, but ultimately I think we always want to do both and we think good drama enhances the comedy and vice versa. But I think the best compliments we’ve gotten on this movie are when, people can really feel like they can relate and I feel like we are in a dialogue with them as filmmakers. That’s what we want.

Entertainment Voice: What’s next?

Gillian Jacobs: I just started shooting season 6 of “Community” for Yahoo yesterday. So I will be doing that for the next four months and I’m in “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” the spiritual cousin of “Life Partners.” That opens next year.

Leighton Meester: I spent a large portion of this year doing a play in NY, I just put out some music and I’m going to be doing a lot of promotion for that in the next few months.

Susanna Fogel: Joni and I have a TV show that we adapted from a Spanish telenovela called “Chasing Life” that just got picked up for a second season with ABC Family.

Entertainment Voice: Life Partners Trilogy? [Laughter]

Susanna Fogel: Ah, yes we’re going to do the “Boyhood” thing with them. They’re roommates in the nursing home.

Gillian Jacobs: That’s great.

Susanna Fogel: Actually I’m into that. We can do that next year with prosthetics.

‘Life Partners’ hits theaters on Dec. 5.