Currently available to stream on Hulu, The Drop is dark cringe comedy with an outlandish, yet compelling premise. The film was directed by Sarah Adina Smith and originated from Smith's inclination to approach Force Majeure from a female perspective. Starring Anna Konkle and Jermaine Fowler, it follows the story of Lex and Mani—a married couple who are ready to expand their family. However, their confidence in themselves as parents is shattered when Lex accidentally drops their friend's baby at a destination wedding in Mexico. Thankfully, no serious damage is done, but the near-disastrous incident affects the dynamic of the group and throws Lex and Mani's future into question.
Jillian Bell and Joshua Leonard play Lindsey and Josh, the eccentric couple who is hosting their friends' destination wedding while simultaneously seeking investors for their resort. Jillian Bell has previously starred in projects such as Godmothered, Brittany Runs a Marathon, and 22 Jump Street. Meanwhile, Leonard is known for his work on The Blair Witch Project and serves as The Drop's co-writer in addition to his onscreen role.
Bell and Leonard chat exclusively with Screen Rant about the existential exploration at the heart of the dark comedy and the process of creating a movie like The Drop without a script.
Jillian Bell & Joshua Leonard Talk The Drop
Screen Rant: I would love to know your first reactions when you were pitched the concept of the story.
Jillian Bell: I think when I read the logline, I did something like [gasps]—like that. Then I just kept going and there were more gasps as I went on and that, to me, is a juicy script. There was a scriptment for this, it was a little bit different, and the idea of being able to work with these brilliant actors and get to improvise, but we have the scriptment to know where we're going and what the arc of every scene was...it was just such a joy. I mean, when do you get to do that? So I was in pretty quickly.
Joshua Leonard: Sarah Adina Smith, the director, and I wrote the movie together. The original idea for the movie came from Sarah's longtime partner and now husband of 15 years—Shaheen. Sarah was a big fan of the movie Force Majeure, which was based on the premise that this man, this husband and father—there was an avalanche coming, and he bailed and left his family to potentially get buried by an avalanche to save himself, essentially breaking the central tenet of masculinity, or our internal interpretation of what masculinity is supposed to be.
Sarah was really interested in exploring a female version of that, so she asked Shaheen, "We've been together 15 years. What could I do that would make you feel like you married a dud?" And Shaheen was like, "I don't know. Maybe if you dropped a baby." So that was the original idea, and she shared that with me and I thought it was a really stupid and amazing concept to base a movie around. Just because if it happened, it would make people feel a lot of things and analyze themselves and analyze all the people around them in a whole different way. That was kind of the spark.
Jillian Bell: There's no way that that happens within your friend group, and you don't go home that night having the conversation of it. Of, "What would you do if that was me?" I found that so interesting. At the beginning of the scriptment, it describes all the different characters. I'm like, "What are they going to think? Are they a baby dropper? Are they not? Do they think they're too good for that?" So I found it fascinating.
Joshua, was there something that was particularly important for you to convey to the audience about relationships or parenthood when you were writing this?
Joshua Leonard: In every comedy that I love there's usually some pretty deep existential exploration that's going on underneath, which I think is kind of what you were talking about. And in this movie, we had just gone into a pandemic, my mother had just passed away, Sarah was very ambivalent as to whether she wanted to have a child or not. So as creatives, all of this stuff kind of went into the conversations, and hopefully the movie shouldn't feel like that, because it's only a comedy if you can process that through the absurdity of life filter. But yeah, there was some real exploration that went into that. By the time we were filming, Sarah was eight months pregnant. She made her decision in the process of writing and now has a beautiful young son.
This technically wasn't scripted, and you said some of it was improv. Can you give some more insight into what that looked like as an actor and as a writer?
Jillian Bell: There was a pretty detailed scriptment. About 45 pages or something like that. So enough to get to know the characters, the arcs of the scene, and where we're headed. What was fun is Sarah sort of set up these work space sessions. We were doing it over Zoom and getting to know each other and figuring out what would get each character to these points, and I love that. Nothing loses or wins. It's sort of just, "Let's throw everything out and what we're thinking and see what sticks." As an actor, it's sort of dreamy. To get your own thing made as a writer, creator, producer, anything can be very difficult, especially now. I feel like with this, it sort of goes, "Okay, we trust our actors enough to help us tell this story and figure out who these people really are." So to me, it was probably a little bit of a leap of faith for them, or maybe a big leap of faith, but I think it pays off because then you get something that's totally original feeling.
Joshua Leonard: I will just back that up and say the process of doing an improvised movie...you prep as much as you can, but then so much of it is just a trust fall for everybody involved. It is a living organism and the hope is that, in the process of it, you'll catch this lightning in a bottle, and really catch people bringing the best of themselves, and the most spontaneous of themselves, and making the lines better and truer than you could have ever written them. I think with this group of actors, we were just so f*cking wildly fortunate with every single actor in this movie, to have people who showed up and took these sketches of characters that we'd come up with and embodied them, and humanized them, and gave them history, and gave them inside jokes, and gave them real hearts and flesh and blood. It's a really cool thing to experience.
Jillian Bell: There are so many wins when you can do that, but there are also some big fails. But it's cool to have a space where you feel safe to just create and trust that they're going to look after you, not only in the scene is your partner going to help you, but also, in the edit. It can be so many different movies. By the time we were going to see it, a lot of us for the first time at the Tribeca Film Festival, we're like, "What's the movie? What's the movie going to be?" We went in so many different directions that you're like, "Who knows what's going to make it?" And that's the most exciting part.
About The Drop
Lex (“PEN15’s” Anna Konkle) and Mani (“Coming 2 America’s” Jermaine Fowler) are a happily married young couple, running their dream artisanal bakery in Los Angeles and excited about starting a family together. A trip to a tropical island resort for a friend’s destination wedding, coinciding with Lex’s ovulation cycle, feels like the perfect opportunity to conceive. But good vibes and high hopes are cut short when, shortly after their arrival to paradise, Lex accidentally drops her friend’s (Aparna Nancherla, “Search Party”) baby in front of all their friends. Paradise becomes purgatory for our couple as recriminations, passive-aggression and old wounds begin to permeate the island reunion and throw Mani and Lex’s future into deep uncertainty.
Check back soon for our other interviews with The Drop cast here:
And check out our other interviews with Jillian Bell here:
The Drop is currently available to stream on Hulu.