Sweet scene bonds young 'Me and Earl' stars
WASHINGTON — Chances are, movie audiences will fall in love with the kids of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl over popsicles.
There are no Avengers, Terminators or Minions in the indie comedy/drama that garnered raves and scooped up awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Instead, there's a trio of lovable high-schoolers — Greg (Thomas Mann), Rachel (Olivia Cooke) and Earl (RJ Cyler) — at the center of the one little movie that everyone has to see this summer (in select cities Friday and expanding June 19).
The heart and humor come alive in a poignant scene seen in the trailer that cements the main characters as a tight threesome. Greg is hanging out with Rachel, a classmate with leukemia whom his mom has insisted he spend time with, and his best pal, Earl, aka Greg's "co-worker." (The two guys spend their free time remaking classic movies in their signature low-budget style, such as A Sockwork Orange and Apocalypse Wow.)
Earl breaks it down while the three enjoy frozen treats on a quiet street corner: "Dude's terrified of calling somebody his friend and they saying, 'Hey, bro, I'm not your friend.' Then he'll have to kill himself."
For Me and Earl, it's a moment akin to the boys walking on the train tracks in Stand By Me or John Cusack holding a boombox in Say Anything ... . What's more impressive: It was the very first scene, filmed in Pittsburgh.
"From then on, they became friends," says director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. "They started to become this beautiful little triptych."
The filmmaker had some butterflies because it was the first time all three actors were together. Cyler, 20, an inexperienced thespian from Jacksonville, was cast just two weeks before the start of filming, so there had been no screen tests to see if they had chemistry.
No one had more jitters walking on that set than Cyler, though. "Seeing Thomas and Olivia made me nervous, because they're on my 'instant' queue on my Netflix," he says. "I was like, 'Calm down, RJ, don't start shaking or they'll think you're weird.' "
But he and Mann, 23, had bonded the night before. They met up in Cyler's hotel room and went over the scene 20 times so "he wouldn't have to be worrying about the lines the next day," Mann recalls.
Cyler ended up being "amazing," says Cooke, 21. "We were all trying to chase how real and subtle he was."
Anytime you put a group of young people together on a film, "it's a lottery" whether it will work, she adds.
"You never know," Mann says. "We're all sitting on the steps having ice cream, and after that it was like, 'This feels right, and everything's going to be OK.' "