Kristen’s bride and doom

US funny woman Kristen Wiig is reluctant to say how she feels about rolling around in bed with Mad Men’s Jon Hamm in the opening scene of the raucous film comedy Bridesmaids.

“That question’s hard to answer because I want to say ‘oh, it was fun’ but then I sound like a big perv,” says the woman best known in the US for comedy show Saturday Night Live.

“I think we laughed through the whole thing. Paul made me laugh the way he was shouting out things for Jon to do to me.”

Paul is director Paul Fieg, who says filming that bedroom romp was “like choreographing the world’s hardest fight scene”.

Hamm is already established as sexy eye candy in the minds of Mad Men fans.

British actor and comedian Chris O’Dowd, the star of C4 comedy The IT Crowd, who recently got serious in the BBC2 costume drama The Crimson Petal And The White, is getting an idea of that sort of reaction now that American audiences have seen him as a police officer romantically involved with Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids. He’s having to cope with being called a sex symbol in the US.

“Obviously the character is a very sweet guy and that’s all great,” he says with an air of embarrassment.

“The sex symbol thing is so fleeting and I can’t wait to play a bald monk in the next thing.”

But has he suffered the romantic frustration that his character experiences in the movie? “Yeah. Yeah, a lot of women being really unimpressed is something that I grew up with and perfected and live with on a daily basis. No, every woman has always loved me.”

Success in the US isn’t about to make him change what he does. Another series of The IT Crowd is still a desire.

“If we can get it going, we’re talking about doing it end of the year or early next year,” he says.

Wiig was seen earlier this year alongside two other British funny men – Simon Pegg and Nick Frost – in the sci-fi alien comedy Paul.

Bridesmaids, a comedy of girls behaving badly, is a much more personal project as she penned it with writing partner and long-time friend Annie Mumolo, who she met years ago at Los Angeles-based improvisation troupe The Groundlings.

She also stars as a woman going through a disastrous time in her own personal and work life as she plays maid of honour at her best friend’s wedding.

Producer Judd Apatow liked what she did in Knocked Up and asked her to write the script. By all accounts, it ended up a collaborative affair involving Apatow and director Fieg among others. “There was no telling someone what to do or you have to take this out,” says Wiig.

“It was very collaborative. And when the cast came along, the same thing happened. We wanted them all to feel comfortable playing their characters and we encouraged improvising.

Annie and I didn’t swear by every word in the script, we have so many funny improvisers so we wanted to use them.”

FIEG feels the script has to be a strong imprint for an emotional story as well as for the comedy.

“You know you’re going to improvise but never go into a scene saying ‘hey, let’s see what happens.’ You have the scripted version that’s great anyway, you play with it on top it and make it your own.

“It gets you away from what a lot of comedies, especially romantic comedies, have which is it’s very scripted and very written so it doesn’t feel in the moment.

“Even if they’re just tweaking the wording a little bit of already written lines, it just feels like people having a conversation. They can surprise each other and then you get that energy.”

The collaborative process in movies was new to O’Dowd. “It’s because Americans have so much more money,” he suggests.

“I’m being flippant in a way, but the amount of time a bigger budget gives you does mean you can play an awful lot more. On The IT Crowd we don’t improvise at all really.

“But what I really liked about this process on Bridesmaids was that you would do the script which was really great. People sometimes improvise for the sake of it because they like the idea of improvising, whereas what they’re actually doing is just taking away really good lines that were there in the first place.

“What was great in this was that we got the script and we would do a little improv and Kristen is the best improvisor I’ve worked with so it’s kind of an amazing thing.”

For Fieg, working with real comedy professionals means that although there’s an illusion of chaos it’s all under control. “It’s like a dance, everyone knows what to do, everyone knows how to do the timing, everyone knows when to back off, when to go forward.

“My job is just to stay out of the way and not interfere with that natural rhythm because there’s nothing worse than a director that comes in and says ‘oh, try this, say this’. It throws it off and all I do is sit back and say, ‘maybe try this’, kind of adjust the ship as it’s going along.”

Weddings have long been used as a source of comedy and drama, some of which – think Four Weddings And A Funeral – have been incredibly successful.

“You know what, when we were writing it we really didn’t think about any of the other movies,” says Wiig. “We didn’t go out of our way to watch any movies. We wanted to keep it to what we wanted to write.”

Fieg adds: “This is very much a story about a woman going through a terrible time in her life and getting this maid of honour duty just throws it all off. It’s just more that the wedding brings a bunch of characters who wouldn’t normally be together together and then just pushes them, drives them forward.”

􀁧 Bridesmaids (15) is now showing in cinemas