‘WRONG’ & CRAZY
‘Missy’ star Lapkus’ really ‘big character’
So count your blessings.
In “The Wrong Missy,” which premiered Wednesday on Netflix, Lauren Lapkus (“Orange Is the New Black,” “The Unicorn”) plays Missy, Tim’s (David Spade) off-the-wall blind date whose lesser offenses include licking her hair at dinner, screaming in public and carrying around a knife with a name.
“I love doing big characters,” Lapkus, 34, told the Daily News last Friday. “I’ve been doing improv for like 15 years and I tend to play very big, wild characters in my improv. And this was kind of the first chance I’d gotten to audition for something where I get to be that crazy onscreen.”
Though the movie takes place in today’s world — the precoronavirus version at least — Tim and Missy’s messy introduction isn’t thanks to an app, but the well-meaning recommendation of his grandmother.
“He wouldn’t have picked me if he saw me on an app,”
Lapkus said of her character. “My profile probably would have been insane. … I think she’d go full force on the profile and be really a lot. She’d probably figure out how to get GIFs on her profile and make it a crazy thing that plays a song. You know, I’m sure it’d be a very annoying page.”
Months after putting their disastrous first date behind him, Tim inadvertently mistakes imbalanced Missy for the alluring Missy he recently met. Instead of inviting the latter to go with him on a tropical company trip, he invites Lapkus’ Missy, and things go even more haywire than one would want to envision.
Among the most bizarre scenes in the film, Spade’s character wakes up to Missy attempting to pleasure him, only to learn she’s been doing so for hours while he’s been conked out. In a subsequent scene, he wakes up to Missy grinding on top of him, something she’d again begun while he was unable to consent.
Too much, in this #MeToo era?
“It really didn’t read that way to me,” Lapkus told The News of Missy’s rather questionable ethics. “It didn’t cross my mind in that way. I think it was more just — it’s such a broad comedy. It’s truly just an over-the-top moment. And I think, yeah. I fully, you know, I’m in support of all the #MeToo stuff, so it’s not — I didn’t see it that way.”
And while it takes much of the movie to work through the cartoonish portion of Missy’s personality to uncover, well, a human, the latter part eventually comes to light.
“For me, it was necessary to try to find moments of balance so that you could see why he’s still able to hang around with her, that there are moments of like, connection or fun or even just moments where her more human side comes through and she’s not screaming or being totally bananas,” Lapkus said.
That said, Lapkus would likely not have stuck around for even a fraction of the time Tim did.
“There were enough things just within that first five seconds of seeing her again that would have been enough to not want to hang out,” she said of the pair’s reunion. “Although, you know, I might have put the nail in the coffin on dating his character because he doesn’t bring that much to the table.”