Interview: Hot Tub Time Machine stars Lizzy Caplan and Collette Wolfe!

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE comes out this Friday which features four friends sent back to the 80s with the opportunity to change their own lives. The film features the quartet of John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Clark Duke and Craig Robinson, but behind the leading men are the gorgeous women they’re trying to get with.

In this case, that’s Lizzy Caplan who plays a potentially timeline-altering love interest to Cusack, and Collette Wolfe, who is Cusack’s hard partying sister and Clark Duke’s mother, whom he’s not too happy to see running around in her heyday.

My fellow journalists and I had a chance to sit down with the ladies at the MGM press junket in Lake Tahoe and they had a lot to say about working with the guys, how they feel about the ‘80s and the lengths they went to in order to land this gig.

Lizzy Caplan is quite hilarious, and when I ran into her on my floor, she even said had love for JoBlo.com, which earns her some bonus points. Collette Wolfe was a bit more reserved, as this was her first press event, but the two of them opened up during the interview and we had a great time.

Was the movie as much fun to make as it looked onscreen?

Lizzy Caplan: Yes. It’s a bunch of funny people in an abandoned ski lodge so it’s going to be a good time. You guys must have been pretty young in the decade of the 80s, do you remember a lot from it?

Colette Wolfe: I was 25! I just have amazing plastic surgery. LC: You look like Tara Reid!

CW: [Laughter] Oh thanks!

American Pie Tara Reid

LC: Yes, that is a compliment. Yeah uh, I remember breastfeeding. My mom may have had a perm during said breastfeeding.

Does that mean you have to do research for a movie like this?

LC: Yeah I went and Wikipedia-ed “The 80s”

CW: And then you were like “Done! Got it!”

LC: Like a TON of stuff happened in that decade!

CW: [Laughing] And it’s all right there in one paragraph! I did actually go online and look at some stuff, and I called my mom and asked her because I wanted to know what she thought about hairstyles and stuff, and she told me “Christie Brinkley, that’s who you want to look like!” So I went online and found all these pictures online of Christie Brinkley circa 1985 with Billy Joel and brought it to the hair people and I was like, “Make me look like her!”

LC: “Make me look like a woman whose husband doesn’t pay attention to her because he’s so high on cocaine!”

What do you like or not like from the decade?

LC: A lot of the fashion is coming back and I like it, some of the stuff, not so much, fashion-wise. Music was great. It’s a very expressive decade. I kind of wish I was of a certain age during it that would have been quite a time, but since I was just in diapers it was pretty much just toys and…boredom.

So did they have to tell you some of the 80s references that were in the film?

LC: Yeah, I think I got most of them. But I had an older sister, so I watched a lot of movies that I was too young to be watching at the time. For film, it’s kind of an amazing decade, lots of boobs.

Did you guys get to do a lot of your own improv in the movie?

LC: Yeah, it was a very free and open set partly because Steve Pink likes that, and partly because the script was..

CW: ..in a constant state of flux.

Was it hard to keep up with these guys at any point, such comic pros?

LC: They’re not THAT funny. I’ve meet FAR funnier people who are truly intimidating.

CW: [Laughing] Yeah, this was cake!

Was there one scene in particular you guys enjoyed shooting?

CW: I really had fun having sex with Rob Corddry.

LC: I had fun having sex with Rob Corddry too… Oh, in the MOVIE? [Laughter] There was one scene while we were lying down in the snow and it was freezing cold, but there’s something cool about that. It’s nice when it’s a little difficult physically, because then you don’t feel like such a spoiled brat doing this for a living.

Were there scenes that you guys shot that didn’t make the movie just for time’s sake?

CW: Yeah there were a lot of scenes that didn’t make the movie, but I don’t know, because I didn’t ever get to see those scenes, that they would have necessarily made the movie better, just that my part would have been bigger.

LC: So it would have been better!

CW: [Laughing] Exactly! I don’t know that it would have actually made it better, but it might have slowed it down.

LC: That’s a really good way to think about it, I just get mad.

CW: Yeah that first, then OK, what’s the healthy way? Better for the movie, not just me

LC: Right, “the movie.” [Laughter]

Is this your type of comedy? The gross-out stuff?

CW: Yeah, barfing? Hilarious!

LC: A good stoner comedy is gold.

Did either of you audition with John [Cusack]?

LC: I first went in for Lyndsy Fonseca’s character Jenny and then the April character wasn’t even in it. Then I went back to meet with them, they were talking about [Collette’s] role, then there was this other role. This whole audition process was pretty strange because they were kind of writing it as they went.

CW: And they didn’t stop until… a couple days ago. [Laughter]

How about you Collette, did you have to audition?

LC: [Laughing] Ohhh the audition story! It’s a good one.

CW: Yeah, she’s heard this.

Oh well now you have to tell us!

CW: Ok, ok! Well I went in to audition, and I knew there was a sex scene, because it was written in there. And so part of what made the sex scene funny, and not just sexual, was that she was humping and saying stuff while she’s humping and she’s talking to people. I felt like they wouldn’t really know if it was funny unless they saw me humping, so I got on the floor and did the humping while I did the scene…and they didn’t laugh.

[Laughter]

Thank you Steve Pink. The room was dead silent, you could have heard a pin drop, and I was like, “Oh my God, I just gave up my dignity, they didn’t laugh and I didn’t get the job.” So I promptly left and started bawling. Then they had me come back and do it again and again, with no laughter, and I was like, “This is crazy!” and then I got the job that night and I was like “Oh! Humping worked! OK good.”

Who’s the biggest jokester on set?

CW: Craig [Robinson], he makes up nicknames for everyone and sings songs spontaneously.

LC: Yeah he sang a lot in the lobby of the lodge we were at, there was a piano and he would sit at the piano and make up songs about everybody.

What’s next for you guys?

CW: I have a show on NBC coming out, it’s called 100 Questions, it’s a sitcom, it premieres May 27th after Community.

LC: My show Party Down, on Starz, is doing its second season. It starts the end of April, the 23rd. And I’m doing a movie called 127 hours. It’s the guy, that hiker, who had the boulder fall on his arm.

With Danny Boyle and James Franco?

LC: Yeah, that one.

And you’re playing…the boulder?

LC: Yeah, exactly. I wish I played the boulder, that way I’d be in the movie more.

Alright, thanks a lot guys!

Thank you!

And she even likes JoBlo.com!