More Comedies With Wild Sex Scenes, Please
An outrageous film requires outrageous writing—and in the case of Joy Ride, outrageous brainstorming sessions. When the comedy’s writers, Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, were working on a sex scene involving a Theragun and a basketball, they figured they should test out the sequence themselves. (Adding unusual props meant untangling some complicated physics.) So Hsiao took a basketball, placed it between her legs, laid down on her back, and Chevapravatdumrong Theragun-ed away. “We’re authentic … I mean, it’s like, ‘Write what you know,’” Chevapravatdumrong deadpanned when we spoke over Zoom last month. “So we had to know it first.”
The road-trip comedy, now in theaters, juggles tones and locations as it tracks the journey of Audrey (played by Ashley Park), a lawyer who travels to China with a trio of mismatched friends to close a business deal and search for her birth, which topped the box office when it was released in June, followed Maddie (), a 32-year-old Uber driver who pretends to date a rich 19-year-old so that she can save her family home. , a movie from writer-director Emma Seligman about two teenagers who would do to sleep with their high school’s hottest cheerleaders—in this case, starting a female fight club just to approach them—hits screens in August.
