This article contains spoilers about Another Simple Favor.
What’s a wedding in Capri without a little murder?
In Another Simple Favor, there are more deaths than “I do’s” as the body count mounts, beginning with Emily’s ex-husband Sean (Henry Golding), and escalating to include her new spouse, Dante (Michele Morrone), FBI agent Irene Walker (Taylor Ortega), Emily’s mother Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins), and more.
But while we always suspected at least one of the wedding guests would be marked for murder (it’s a thriller, duh), we didn’t expect the first death to be Sean (or for it to be quite so brutal).
“In the first draft of the script, he showed up, but he was just getting pushed around a lot,” writer-director Paul Feig tells Entertainment Weekly. “And when I was talking to Henry, he was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do that again.’ So, when we came up with the idea that he would be the first victim, he loved it.”
One thing that didn’t change? Sean’s transformation into a truly heinous person and alcoholic. “It felt natural,” Feig explains. “His life has been destroyed by being with Emily and then getting wrapped up with Stephanie and getting played for the fool. It felt like a real natural progression.”
Courtesy of Amazon Content Services
Henry Golding as Sean in ‘Another Simple Favor’
“Our writers wrote him pretty bitter and mean,” the director continues. “And at first I was worried Henry wouldn’t want to play that. Then when I told him about it, he was like, ‘I want to be terrible.’ So, he really went for it. Henry added a lot of those lines that are really brutal. He was coming up with those and surprising me with them.”
Those lines make Sean’s death a bit more welcome than it would have been previously, and Golding had one request for his exit from the Simple Favor world. “He said, ‘All l I ask is that my death would be really gruesome and horrible,'” Feig adds. “And I said, ‘All right, man, I can accommodate that for you, sir.'”
And boy, did they. While, erm, pleasuring himself in the shower, a fully naked and very drunk Sean is taken aback by a familiar face who enters his bathroom. We don’t see who it is, but instead, we only see the hypodermic needle plunged into Sean’s finger, which quickly leads to him bleeding out his nose, eyeballs, and ears before collapsing to his death straight through the glass shower door.
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“The man wants to go for it, and I am a maximalist,” Feig says. “If somebody wants to go do something nutty, then I am all for it.”
“I haven’t seen a good shower death in a movie in a while,” he continues. “And there was something fun of playing with like, ‘Oh, is it going to be like Psycho? Is he going to get stabbed?”
But Feig wanted something more clever and creative (in general, he prefers not to showcase gun use in his films). Enter the influence of the true-crime podcast industry. “When I had that scene all set and had him getting the hypodermic needle, [my producing partner Laura Fischer] was like, ‘They always say in these podcasts that they can’t trace it, if you inject somebody under their nail,” he reveals. “That’s where the whole thing of putting it in the front of his finger came from.”
Sounds like another simple murder.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
