Conversations With Melissa Rauch, Sebastian Stan and Thomas Middleditch About Hilariously Funny New Comedy ‘The Bronze’

Sandra Miska

Melissa Rauch is best known as perky microbiologist Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz on the hit sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.” She gets a chance to show a different side of her acting chops in “The Bronze,” a raunchy comedy that Rauch also co-wrote her husband Winston Rauch. Rauch plays Hope Anne Gregory, a former professional gymnast who now spends her days roaming her hometown of Amherst, Ohio, scoring freebies and tormenting her dad. Everything changes for her when a younger local gymnast, 16-year-old Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson), begins her ascent. With an inheritance of $500,000 dangling in front of her, Hope must accept that her days of stardom are long past and train the next generation.

“Silicon Valley” star Thomas Middleditch plays Ben, Hope’s love interest who runs the local gym. She calls the mild-mannered Ben “Twitchy” because of his unfortunate twitch. “Captain America” actor Sebastian Stan co-stars as Hope’s nemesis and former lover Lance, a fellow gymnast and coach who longs to lure Maggie away from Hope.

Rauch and her three co-stars recently spoke with Entertainment Voice about the hilarious film. Rauch began by talking about her creative partnership with husband Winston and the role a manager at a New Jersey pretzel shop played in their coming up with the concept for “The Bronze.”

Rauch exclaims “We met in college when we were around Haley’s age, actually. We always loved writing together and this idea came out of a trip to a mall in New Jersey. We were visiting my family and I had started to have a little bit of success on TV, a tiny bit [on “Best Week Ever”]. We were at the mall and the manager of Wetzel’s Pretzels gave me a free pretzel and said he really liked the show, and I was so excited. Winston and I ate that pretzel [as if] it was the best tasting thing in the world. Winston even went back up and asked for cheese sauce. And then, a few months later the show was canceled. We went back to the mall and the manager blew me off . . . didn’t give me a pretzel. We started to talk about it, and I was really in a depressed state. I was out of work. I was really scared about where my next job was coming from and I was back in New Jersey and everyone was asking me when I was going to give up on this dream and go get a real job; so him not giving me the pretzel felt so bad. It was just symbolic of where I was at in life. We were just, like, eating that pretzel with the salt of our tears. That sort of birthed this idea of what that can do to the psyche and celebrity in a small town and how that can mess with you on a grander scale. And the idea of the bronze medal . . . we’re huge gymnast and Olympic fans in general, and we were always fascinated by the idea of when the announcer always says, ‘They’ll have to settle for the bronze.’ That’s the third best in the entire world! That’s pretty amazing. That was something, so we sort of melded those two together.”

Although Rauch herself has no background in gymnastics, once she and Winston decided to write a sports film, making her character a gymnast was the obvious choice. “I wasn’t going to play a WNBA player,” she said with a laugh, referring to her short stature. “There are not many athletes I could play. So, that was part of it. …We sort of always write about things that we’re going through in that moment to help us contextualize our experience of that moment . . . . We knew we wanted to set it in the world of sports and [playing a gymnast] was the closest I could come to an athlete.”

Richardson, who turned 21 the day before our interview, was only 19 while filming of “The Bronze.” “It was barely acceptable for me to be a part of this movie,” she joked. The young actress had to go through a rigorous audition before she secured the part of Maggie. “I definitely didn’t nail it,” she recalled. Although Richardson was late to the audition and flustered, Rauch and director Bryan Buckley felt she embodied the spirit of the character, especially after she nailed her monologue.

Without giving too much away, “The Bronze” has an ending that’s somewhat atypical for a sports film. Rauch spoke about the decision to have a resolution that’s more rooted in reality than uplifting. “We played with it. That was another thing that was important to us; We didn’t want to spend an hour and a half with these characters that people have invested in and really gone on a journey with [Hope] and . . . all of a sudden have her do a total turnaround . . . . People in real life take years, if ever, to move that much, so we really wanted in an hour and a half her to move a realistic amount, and we felt that everything that we did along the way in this movie was very much truthful to her circumstances. We did resist the temptation at the end to make that big Hollywood happy ending and not have it be a bunch of movie magic.”

Rauch spoke about “The Big Bang Theory” and her character Bernadette who is going through an exciting and challenging time as she prepares to welcome her first child with her husband Howard (Simon Helberg). Rauch made it clear that she is not pregnant in real life. “When [they] wrote that storyline, I was so excited. I was surprised. I found out that night before the table read. I just opened the script and it was on the second to last page of the script. There’s just that one line, ‘We’ll find another time to tell Howard that I’m pregnant,’ and I looked at it and looked at it again. We were taping that night, so we all got the script in our dressing rooms, which normally we get at home but for some reason we had all gotten it early. So we all were popping into [one another’s] dressing rooms like, ‘Oh my god, Bernadette’s pregnant!’ And then there was, ‘Listen, are you really pregnant and didn’t tell us?’ And I also called my parents the night before it aired saying ‘[I] just want to warn you.’ And I never tell them storylines in advance, but I was like, ‘Bernadette’s pregnant. I’m not pregnant in real life. You’re going to be TV grandparents, but they’re not writing anything into the script.’”

What kind of parents does Rauch think Bernadette and Howard will be? “First of all, I’m interested to see if the baby’s going to be in a onesie with a belt buckle like Howard. I’m worried about the cry on that baby; between Bernadette’s high-pitched voice and the Wolowitz’s genes of screaming. It’s going to be an interesting tone to the cry. I think they’ll be good parents. I think Howard is so fun-loving and I think he’s wanted to be a father for so long, and I think it’s going to be something that’s going to be healing for his character . . . the fact that his father has left [him] at an early age. I’m curious how they’re going to handle it. I know Bernadette, for a while, didn’t want children, and I don’t know that she’s the most maternal, although she is very good at mothering Howard, so I’m curious to what that dynamic will be.”

The guys spoke next, and they began by discussing what drew them each to the project.

Middleditch explained “I didn’t know anyone kind of going into [this], so it was a pretty standard situation of getting a script and reading it and liking it a lot. I just felt it was so well written; the characters were really defined. The humor was just dark enough that I would really, really enjoy it. It was just genuinely funny. A lot of comedy scripts you get aren’t funny and this one was. I just had to audition and get the part, really.”

“I just found myself quoting [the script] to other friends and then thinking about it the next day after I read it and just, I don’t know, it was one of those things sometimes you just get excited about and it stays with you. That’s usually a good sign,” said Stan.

Middleditch’s character Ben or “Twitchy” has a nervous twitch throughout the film, which became second nature to the actor. “Actually, it was harder to remember to stop. The idea is to make it natural so you kind of just get into the habit of actually doing it. Watching [the film at the premiere] last night, I found myself doing it in the theater, which was scary. I was like, ‘Is this a part of me now? Is this my Joker? Is this what makes me go insane?’”

While Ben is a sweetheart who is considerate to those around him, Stan’s character Lance only thinks of himself and isn’t above playing dirty to get what he wants. Was it hard for Stan to play such a jerk? “Somehow that’s never really hard,” he answered jokingly. “I don’t know. Sometimes you feel a little bit like, at least with Bryan, you start feeling like you’re hamming it up or something. When you have a director that you really can trust and you feel like he knows what he’s doing . . . then it’s like his take is going to be way better than what I’m actually [doing] in my head.”

“To your credit, you played this great,” Middleditch interjected. “I picture Lance as like, he’s such an 80s villain/bad guy including taking out his shades at choice moments and putting on fucking chapstick and shit. It never feels like we’re in ‘Hot Tub Time Machine,” you know what I mean? Not to slam that movie . . . .  It doesn’t feel like it’s out of place. But he is kind of this over-the-top dickhead. It’s great.”

“The Bronze” opens nationwide March 18.