Whitney Cummings is recalling the “horror” audition she had for Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis.
The comedian and host of Max’s Fast Friends game show recently said in an interview she had a “humiliating” audition for the epic science fiction film directed and written by Coppola.
“This was such a core trauma for me,” Cummings said on the Good For You podcast.
Cummings said that she had prepared for the audition spending days memorizing lines and when she got to the audition, she noticed the vibes were off.
“Everyone is so quiet. There’s no vibe of, ‘We’re at an audition. Hey, what’s up? Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you,’” she recalled. “It’s just so awkward. I go in, I’m like, ‘So, where do you want to start first?’ And he’s, like, ‘Oh no, no, we’re not going to do the scene.’ I was like, ‘OK, It’s three days of my life.’”
The audition process was different and Coppola asked the actors to improvise scenes with Cummings adding, “He would just throw things at me.”
Cummings said that one of the prompts was to bid farewell to her son going off to war using an English accent. Another thing she was asked to improvise was confront her husband using an Australian accent. All of this made Cummings belief she was being punked, saying, “Because I did the show Punk’d, I was like, if I’m being punked, this is actually genius.”
She continued, “I started glazing over, and then he was, like, ‘That was great.’ I don’t know where I went. I just completely disassociated.”
“I am improvising my head off to just nothing,” she said. “Why am I acting with him? He’s, like, ‘It’s going to be me and we’re going to improvise the scene.’ I’m, like, ‘But you don’t [improvise].’ Has anyone ever told you the truth since Apocalypse Now? Right? Has anyone told you the truth? No.”
By the end of the process, Cummings said she was “so embarrassed” and said the director gave her a “sifne copy of his new book,” adding, “He signed it in front of me as if I had shown up to an autograph signing as if I wanted [it]. Like, thank you. And then gave me a bottle of Francis Ford Coppola wine. It was just so humiliating — that’s the only [word] — and so confounding in that moment.”
Megalopolis grossed over $13M at the box office worldwide with an estimated budget of $120M. The film also starred Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and more.
Watch Cummings recall her audition process in the video below.
