First-time director Clea DuVall also reveals to ET how her star showed up to set with a broken leg.
Clea DuVall may be best known for her film work, having starred in Argo and Girl, Interrupted, among others, but a cursory glance at her IMDb page shows she has guest starred in just about every popular TV show in the past decade, from CSI to Grey's Anatomy and, most recently, Veep. It's fitting then, that she's assembled an ensemble of actors beloved for their small screen work for her directorial debut.
The Intervention is a dramedy in the vein of The Big Chill, about three couples (played by Melanie Lynskey and Jason Ritter, Natasha Lyonne and DuVall, and Alia Shawkat and Ben Schwartz) who arrange a weekend getaway as a guise to stage a marriage intervention for a fourth couple (Cobie Smulders and Vincent Piazza). In this exclusive clip, the group sees first-hand just how bad things have gotten for their unhappily married friends.
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I recently sat down with DuVall in Los Angeles to discuss the film and she revealed that the characters in her movie weren't the only ones surprised when Smulders turns up injured -- because the actress, who DuVall calls "the nicest, most professional person, maybe that I've ever worked with," broke her leg for real.
Here's the entire story, as DuVall recalls it:
"The night before she left [for Savannah], she broke her leg, but she didn't know. The next morning, she gets up, she goes to the airport with her baby -- her 6-month-old baby -- and she's like, 'My leg really hurts,' and then calls production and says, 'I think I'm going to need to see a doctor. Everything is fine, I'm sure, but maybe I should just have a doctor look at my leg.' So, she lands in Savannah, goes to the doctor and the doctor says, 'Your leg is broken, and you are going to be on crutches for six to eight weeks.' This happened on our first day of filming, is when that news came in.
"Right as we round the first day, which was with Ben and Alia and it was like, the greatest day -- we had so much fun. It was so stress-free, we made our day. We were ahead -- then the second we wrapped, my producer came over and he was like, 'Cobie is here and her leg is broken, and you need to figure out what you want to do, because we need to go to her house right now, and you need to tell her what's going to happen.' And I was like, 'I don't know...?' And we went to her house and she was like, 'I don't know what you want to do. Do you want to get somebody else?' And I was like, 'No! This is what were gonna do!'
"'We are gonna write it into the movie, so rather then you pretending you don't have a broken leg -- which, you're going to hurt yourself more if you don't take care of your leg, and your leg is more important than the movie -- we're just going to put it in and this is how it's going to work.' I talked through the whole script with her, 'We'll do this, this, and this.'"
Now, DuVall says, "It's one of the best things about the movie, I think, is that her leg is broken."
The Intervention is in theaters and on demand on Aug. 26.