How 2026’s Most Outrageous Comedy Was Built Backwards From Its Wildest Scene
The Musical director Giselle Bonilla and writer Alexander Heller spoke with ComingSoon about their outrageous new comedy movie. The duo discussed how the film was conceived, working with Rob Lowe, and more. The hilarious film is out now in theaters.
“Convinced he’s a big fish stuck in a small pond, playwright Doug Leibowitz has been marking time as a theater teacher until he can get himself to New York, where the serious playwrights live. But when an unexpected breakup shocks him, and then he finds out that his ex has been dating the person he hates most in the world, the school principal, his plans turn from purely self-interested…to diabolical. With the coveted Blue Ribbon award just within Principal Brady’s grasp and the principal on high alert, Doug secretly has his middle schoolers rehearse and then perform a play so inappropriate, the only result could be the ruin of Principal Brady’s reputation,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: I really enjoyed The Musical. Giselle, you got some fantastic actors for this film. Rob Lowe, Gillian Jacobs, but it’s Will Brill who’s really front and center. Talk me through casting Will and knowing he could carry this leading performance and stay kind of likable despite going down this toxic descent into madness that he kind of gets through.
Giselle Bonilla: Yeah. Well, I just feel like from my first meeting with Will, I was so affected by just his sense of play. And I knew that I wanted our lead to be somebody who was going to be—as our first feature, it was going to be stressful. We’re going to have like two days to shoot the whole thing—that I wanted somebody, I think, with the work ethic of a theater actor and being able to be flexible, but also be incredibly collaborative. It was important to me.
And I just fell in love with him, but it was really the thing that sparked even just considering him for the film was in his Tony acceptance speech, the first person he thanked was his therapist. And I was like, “I am obsessed with this person. This is our Doug.” And Alex and I made it our mission to convince everybody that it had to be him.
And he’s also from a small town in California. And I read this article of his, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, just being a broke artist in New York, living on people’s couches and sleeping under his friend’s table and just being so committed to the arts at any cost that I just thought, this is who Doug wishes he was. Because Doug has that commitment to the arts and he has that pretension about being like, you have to—that kind of idea of experiencing pain in order to be a true artist, which is bullshit.
But I think he is just of that generation of artists that believes that pain makes you interesting. And he has nothing but himself to inflict that pain. And so it was easy. I just remember asking Will, “Who would you be if you never had the courage to move to New York to pursue theater?” And he just got it.
Alexander, Will’s character in this winds up doing a school play about 9/11. It’s so funny to think about and see the little kids dressed as the Taliban and all that goes on. Can you speak to that idea? Was that the original inkling of where this film was born, or did that come later? Talk me through how you stumbled upon this real gem of an idea that I just thought was so funny.
Alexander Heller: Oh, thank you so much. It’s nice to know that your own psychoses are reflected in another. No, so yeah, I mean, I remember the exact moment I thought of the idea.
It’s sort of weird in this digital age, but I tracked down the note in my phone where it actually all crystallized in my head. And yeah, it was September 9th, 2021, because I always like to think a couple of days ahead, you know.
And yeah, I just had this idea. I knew Giselle and I were in the same grad school together at AFI, and I was thinking about ideas that I wanted to bring forward to pitch to do as a short film. And I knew that that idea had to be something for me that I could also write as a feature.
I had this idea. I had been thinking about Election and thinking about The Producers and thinking about Office Space and the collision of all those kinds of things. And I was like, “Oh, I really wanted this to be this set piece at the end.”
And I knew that it had to be middle school. So the note in my phone literally just says, “Teacher says, ‘F— it,’ does 9/11 play.” But then I was like, okay, that’s not a movie.
So then it was about finding, if that’s where you want to end up, what is the scaffolding and what are we hanging on the scaffolding to make this an actual movie? I just started working backwards from there.
This is so romantic. I should just say it came to me in a dream or whatever. But I was like, okay, it would be a first feature. So we’re talking in the zero-to-three-million-dollar range. So it has to be contained. It has to take place in a school. So these are kind of the guardrails. This is the end. And then it’s like, how do we get there?
I literally just started making a list of Shakespearean themes. I was like, “Love, inheritance, revenge. Oh, revenge. Revenge is kind of good.” So then I was like, great. How do I make this set piece the end of a revenge story? And then that’s where the movie came from.
Giselle, Rob Lowe just has this great reaction during the play that you cut to a few times of just the utmost horror on his face. I mean, I hope it is used as reaction GIFs for years to come. He’s a real master at delivery and comic timing as well. What stood out about working with him and just knowing you had a real experienced actor in that key role?
Giselle Bonilla: It was honestly—it was having him, Gillian, and Will as the adults was so amazing because we had 19 days to shoot and 13 kids, most of which had never acted before. And so whenever it came to the adults, they would just nail it in like one to two takes and we could move on. And everything kind of felt like we were always with a gun to our heads with no time left.
And so Rob just also has a huge sense of play and loves improvising. He would always be open to alts and whatever. He would just commit fully to make it as funny as possible. And we just got so lucky that he got the character and wanted to take a huge swing and go as dark as possible and help us produce the film.
So it was crazy to have somebody with authority in the industry help out a bunch of first-time feature filmmakers because he just has been so hungry to do something original and missed doing comedies. And it’s not like he was making any money on this. So it was really great to just get that version of him who just wanted to make this as legitimate as possible for us, because he was like, “I just haven’t done anything original in quite some time.”
Alexander, the epilogue sequence, I thought was so great. Was that always the way that it was planned to end the film, rather than at the play itself, which is obviously this big moment that you’re building to? Can you just speak to writing that little epilogue? Because I thought that was a nice coda to the film.
Alexander Heller: The goal was always to have a character that did not grow in any way. I think it’s deeply funny. Executives do not. I mean, obviously, Election, one of my favorite movies, has a similar type of fun moment there that drew a lot of inspiration from.
But yeah, it was like—and I think Giselle and I both feel this way—it’s just that extra little thing where it’s like, sometimes real people in your life, they just don’t grow. They don’t change. They don’t hug and tell you that everything is going to be fine.
And for this guy in particular, it’s a very funny thing where it’s just like, “Oh, shit.” And then we can do The Musical 2: A Lot of Revenge, you know?
Thanks to Giselle Bonilla and Alexander Heller for taking the time to talk about The Musical.
Source: Comingsoon.net