Why Charlie Day’s Happy Madison Movie Never Happened
In addition to his decades of TV work on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Charlie Day has had a pretty solid movie career. He got to help fight giant monsters in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, plotted the murder of Jennifer Aniston in Horrible Bosses and voiced Luigi in The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
He also did something in Louis C.K.’s creepy movie that we’re not totally sure about because it was never released and all existing copies were buried in New Mexico next to all the E.T. Atari games, we assume.
Day also came close to starring in a promising buddy comedy, produced by Adam Sandler’s company Happy Madison, along with Andy Samberg. Until one fateful table read, that is.
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On the most recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Samberg and his co-hosts fielded a voicemail question from Steve Agee, who played Steve Myron on The Sarah Silverman Program. “Years ago I did a table read for The Lonely Island for a movie that would’ve starred Andy and Charlie Day,” Agee began. “After the table read, I never heard anything. What did I do wrong?”
“That movie didn’t happen. That’s why,” Samberg joked before going on to explain that “it was a script called BFFs,” co-written with his fellow Lonely Island-er Jorma Taccone, who was also lined up to direct the film. “And it was a Happy Madison movie,” Samberg added.
“It was a really fun, fun table read. We’re very, very grateful to everyone who came, including Steve and Charlie and everyone,” Samberg noted. “And it went pretty good, but it just didn’t go quite good enough, I guess?”
When asked about the purpose of the table read, Samberg explained that different table reads have different goals. “Sometimes it’s a table read, like that one, where it’s like, ‘Let’s see where we are. And let’s see what’s working about it.’ And then there’s other times you’re like, ‘We are shooting, and we’re starting on this date. Let’s do a table read so we can do our production rewrite.”
“I think BFFs was a weirder one,” Taccone added, “because I think you and I, Andy, were thinking of it as the former, and it felt like the latter because it was so big business and a lot of people showed up for it. But like in our minds, we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s see how this is.’”
“I think we thought that because that’s what the studio was saying,” Samberg clarified. “They were like, ‘We’re not sure if we’re ready to greenlight this yet. We wanna see it.’ And so we did it. And then they were like, ‘Nah.’”
While the table read wasn’t a huge success with the studio, Samberg still saw potential in the soon-to-be-scrapped project. “There were definitely parts of it that really worked,” he recalled.
Sadly, Samberg and Taccone didn’t reveal any details concerning BFFs actual plot. Given the title, perhaps it would have been a feature-length adaptation of “Best Friends,” the SNL Digital Short in which Samberg and Katy Perry befriend a meth head, a mad scientist and a time-traveling Abraham Lincoln?
If so, the moviegoing public was robbed.
