WARNING: The following contains minor spoilers for Thunder Force, which arrives on Netflix on April 9.
Octavia Spencer and Melissa McCarthy are two of the hottest actors working today. McCarthy has established herself as a comedic genius with films like Bridesmaids, Spy and The Heat, while Spencer has demonstrated her bottomless versatility in everything from The Help and Ma to The Shape of Water and Onward. Now, the pair have teamed up for Thunder Force, a superhero comedy in which they play estranged best friends who reconnect when they're both imbued with superpowers that let them take on the supervillains running rampant in their city. In hilarious and heartfelt performances, McCarthy and Spencer lampoon the superhero genre while establishing themselves as superheroes in their own right.
In an exclusive interview, CBR chatted with Spencer and McCarthy about picking up the superhero mantle for Thunder Force, including how their long friendship made working on the comedy easy and why they hope middle-aged women and men feel empowered by the film.
CBR: Octavia, you're mostly known as a dramatic actress. What made you want to do a full-blown comedy?
Octavia Spencer: You know what? It's so funny, […] I guess I don't see myself that way. And I wanted to do a comedy with two of the best people in the genre. Melissa McCarthy is versatile, she's one of the most versatile actresses in the industry so that she can do comedy and drama and so beautifully, I thought, "Well, of course, I'm going to do this with two people that will write something amazing." And I get to be opposite Melissa, I mean, it's a win-win situation.
Melissa, you've actually worked with your husband, Thunder Force writer and director Ben Falcone several times now. What in your mind makes that partnership work?
Melissa McCarthy: He's a really good director and a really good writer, so it's like, that's a pretty good place to start. Plus, that's what we have always done. We met at the Groundlings Theater, a little improv theater in Los Angeles. We met writing, we met performing together. He was my favorite person to write with and perform with, so what a bonus. Then we got married and we're life partners. It's just fun. It's fun and there's a shorthand.
And then having Octavia come into that, we've all been friends for 25 years, so there is an ease and fun because […] you can try anything, you can fall down, you can make the biggest swing at something, if it works great and if it doesn't, who cares? It's Ben and Octavia. Everybody is free to kind of experiment and try it because it's how you get some of the biggest hits, and then frankly, when you really bomb trying something, it's the thing you laugh about the most that night, so you can't really go wrong.
Melissa, I have to ask, what was the raw chicken you're eating in the movie?
McCarthy: [Laughs] Would you be upset if I just said chicken?
Yes. Yes, I would.
I know! This brilliant woman spent weeks and weeks and weeks figuring out how to really [mimic the texture] and get that color. It was pear, like Asian pear, but there were all these things done to it. I have to say, when the plate was put down in front of me, it still really seemed like raw chicken, so she did her job incredibly well. Yeah, every time that would come out, to see there's 150 people surrounding you that are just clearly repulsed by you, it was quite a feeling. [Laughs]
We don't see women in their 40s as superheroes on screen pretty much ever. Do you hope that Thunder Force is empowering to women of a certain age?
McCarthy: [nodding] I hope all women and all men. To dismiss half the population at a certain age... If I really want to get something done -- no offense to everyone who's 20 -- do you go to a 20-year-old or do you go to a 45-year-old woman who can get it done? So even just based in reality, I love that this is the story Ben and I wanted to tell. It's like, yes, [our characters] are the two people that I buy would be like, "We got to do something."
Spencer: Yeah, and I will just end it by saying women in their 40s are superheroes. They just are. They get a lot of stuff done, a lot of juggling, keeping all those balls in the air.
Written and directed by Ben Falcone, Thunder Force stars Melissa McCarthy, Octavia Spencer, Bobby Cannavale, Pom Klementieff, Taylor Mosby, Melissa Leo and Jason Bateman. The film arrives on Netflix on Friday, April 9.