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| RJ Cyler as Earl and Thomas Mann as Greg in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. |
Cyler, who’s just as funny in conversation as he is in the
film, shares the success of the film with his two co-stars, Thomas Mann (who
plays Greg) and Olivia Cooke (who plays Rachel). “It was like working with two
friends that I’ve known for years,” Cyler says of his experience working with
his co-stars from the shoot to Sundance and beyond. “It was like we had a
genuine friendship before we even started the shoot, from going to restaurants,
baseball games, and concerts.” The actors even shared their passion for arts
like Earl and Greg do in the film, with Mann and Cooke introducing Cyler their
favourite bands like The Arctic Monkeys. The three stars have natural
chemistry, and seem to be having as much fun playing the parts of three high
school cinéastes grappling with friendship, life, love, and death.
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| Olivia Cooke as Rachel, Thomas Mann as Greg, and RJ Cyler as Earl in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Photo by Anne Marie Fox / Fox Searchlight Pictures |
The close relationship between Cyler and his co-stars gives Me and Earl some of its strongest
emotional depth when Earl and Greg have a falling out late in the film, but
Cyler says he had the right collaborators to keep the atmosphere friendly on
set while taking the film where it needed to go. “Alfonso, or director, is really
genuine in pulling emotion,” he says of the scene where Earl and Greg have
their first fight. “It was like fighting your brother where you’re like, ‘Dude,
I don’t want to fight you, but you’re pissing off right now,’ and we fight, but
we know we’re gonna play Xbox together later. It took a while for me to get
there, but it I was in the moment and the emotions were there. It took me a
whole night to get out that emotional stick, but it was so worth it.” When
asked how he gets out of that moment, Cyler quickly jokes that it takes lots of
sleep and some food, showing that Earl’s candid comedic side is very much like
his own.
Cyler also adds that Me
and Earl Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (American
Horror Story) gave the stars a list of films to watch together during production.
The film sees Earl and Greg make a smorgasbord of cheesy parodies of classic
films, like an amateur library of The Criterion Collection. “He would send each
one of us the entire list of films we were making parodies of with clips,”
Cyler notes, “so we could get a sense of the films we were making.”
The list of parodies featured in Me and Earl ranges from “A
Sockwork Orange” (A Clockwork Orange),
“Monorash” (Rashômon), and “The 400 Bros”
(The 400 Blows), but Cyler says that
his favourite was easily Earl’s biggest star vehicle, 2:48 PM Cowboy, which, coincidentally enough, is a parody of Cyler’s
favourite film, John Schlesinger’s 1969 Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy.
“The most fun for me was 2:48
PM Cowboy,” says Cyler of the parody in which he plays the Joe Buck cowboy
in a take on Jon Voigt’s most iconic role. “I was on a bridge full of Pirates
fans because there was a baseball game about to start when we were shooting the
short. And so I’m walking against the crowd in this cowboy get-up and I was
getting all these crazy looks, and people were stopping me, and I’m like, ‘You
just messed up this take,’ but it was a lot of fun to shoot. And it’s also my
favourite movie, Midnight Cowboy, and
Alfonso’s the one that introduced me to it.”
The cast’s experience of sharing these films with their
director adds to Me and Earl’s
spot-on depiction of the film experience to which film buffs and moviegoers can
relate. “Nowadays [audiences] would rather FaceTime and watch the same movie
rather than meet up at one another’s house or actually go out to a movie
together,” Cyler adds. “The human connection is starting to lose over to people
being in their phones, in their tablets, and their laptops, and real aspect of
conversation and communication is being lost, but this movie shows how great
that is—to actually talk to somebody.”
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| RJ Cyler as Earl and Thomas Mann as Greg in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Photo by Anne Marie Fox / Fox Searchlight Pictures |
The actor’s own career trajectory follows a philosophy of growing
through shared experience, and working through life in a collaborative creative
process. Cyler, who was a dancer before going into acting, can relate to the
coming of age story in Me and Earl. “Me
and my brother Broderick started this dance group when I was diagnosed with
diabetes,” he says, “and it was just like a way to do something and make that
bond between us really strong, and we came up with it together and that became
our brother thing. And I kind of pulled that relationship into that essence
with Greg and Earl like they were like two brothers making things they like.”
The emphasis on the creative process and the importance of
sharing art and experience life with others, really get to the heart of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl as Earl
and Greg push themselves to make a movie for Rachel, who is undergoing
treatment for stage four leukemia. “It’s really a movie about learning how to
appreciate, and share, and create and be artistic and push what’s creative and
pull what’s in you out,” Cyler says.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is now playing in select cities from
Fox Searchlight Pictures.
It opens in Ottawa on
June 26th.
