Kathryn Hahn Says She Pulled Her Best Line in ‘Step Brothers’ From ‘The Deep Recesses of a Recovering Catholic’
“I wanna roll you into a little ball and shove you into my next confession.”
The enduring truth about the traditional Catholic upbringing is that the signature combination of shame and sexual repression inevitably leads to the formation of fantastic comedians and comedic performances. From Conan O’Brien to Stephen Colbert to Jim Gaffigan, the Roman Catholic religion has put out so many giants of comedy whose enormous sexual guilt caused the kind of childhood pain often necessary to win a Peabody Award.
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Kathryn Hahn is one of the many, many comedians who grew up Catholic and afraid of her own primal urges. In a recent appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast Dinner's On Me, the titan of TV and movie comedy revealed that one of the most iconic lines of her career, a steamy, sinful soundbite she whispered into John C. Reilly’s gaping mouth after he punched Adam Scott in the face in Step Brothers, came from her own inner conflict with that good old-fashioned Catholic shame:
“That whole scene when I tell him I’m gonna shove him in my vagina. Kids, I hope you’re listening. That was all not really in the script,” Hahn addressed her two children about the iconic moment in Step Brothers when her character Alice “professed” her “love” to Reilly’s character Dale. “I mean, that came from the deep recesses of a recovering Catholic. I always take it on.”
Hahn clarified that Step Brothers writer and director Adam McKay already had a killer script, saying that the comedy movie magnate “wrote something genius and hilarious,” but that McKay’s on-set philosophy with his actors was to encourage them to “just roll” with it, inspiring Hahn to do some rolling of her own.
Along with the “I wanna roll you into a little ball and shove you up my vagina” scene, Hahn and Reilly improvised many of their other most memorable moments together in Step Brothers. Specifically, in a later encounter, when Alice tries to push Dale to murder her husband, Hahn says that she and Reilly “went down the darkest rabbit (hole),” a natural progression considering their established fascination with going into holes.
Despite what any priest or pope may say, Hahn has no regrets about Step Brothers, and she misses that era when big-name comedians came at each other with off-the-cuff obscenities in mid-budget movies. “I mean, that was such a specific time in comedy,” said Hahn of Step Brothers.
Now that Hahn is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand stars, thanks, in large part, to the success of her MCU show Agatha All Along, maybe she can pull some strings and get the “ball rolling” on Step Brothers 2.
