O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Dave Franco are eager and affable when we chat over Zoom to discuss their new screwball road-trip comedy Idiots. They portray two hapless people who are hired to transfer a rich teen — played by a punchable Mason Thames — to rehab, but their straightforward gig quickly spirals into dangerous mayhem. Comedic roles aren’t uncharted territory for either actor: Jackson Jr. has lent his acting to Cocaine Bear, while Franco can be seen in beloved comedies such as 21 Jump Street, Neighbors, and The Disaster Artist, but here they focus on different aspects of comedy and push absurdity to the extreme.
Billed as a mashup of Dumb and Dumber and Midnight Run, Idiots combines a warm-hearted story about friendship with ridiculousness and gut-busting gross-out moments. (An epic, explosive diarrhea scene inside a motel room is among them.) Idiots is at its best in both the wild and raunchy, laugh-out-loud scenes between deeply unserious people grappling with serious circumstances and the moments where it zooms in on how honest people try to get by and do their jobs to the best of their ability in a system and wider world that could not possibly care less.
In between jokes, laughs, and gentle ribbing between the two, they shared how this on-screen matchup came to be. Building chemistry for the film was easy, leaning on their real-life friendship. Jackson Jr. was told he would succeed in the role. “Dave hit me up and said, ‘Look, I’m doing this movie, and there’s this role that’s next to me that I think you can kill,’” Jackson Jr. shared.
“When I hear that, number one, I appreciate you. Two, he’s one of the best friends I’ve gotten in this business telling me that he believes in me, and that right there puts a chip on my shoulder. In a similar vein, when my father told me he needed me for Straight Outta Compton, it was just like, ‘Okay, we have to go kill this…’” Though he did ask one thing: if he had to do anything weird in the movie. Luckily, Franco left the weirder stuff for himself, loving the idea of being as goofy as possible and fully committing to the role he plays. After Franco stated, “You’re good, I do all the weird s#$%,” Jackson Jr. declared, “I’ll see you in Atlanta.”
On-Screen Odd Couple
Jackson Jr. portrays faith-driven striver Davis, “someone who can’t get out of his own way,” he stated, one part of two polar-opposite characters who comprise the film world’s least qualified transport team. Davis is “not a bad person,” but “he makes bad decisions and lives life by his faith, and he wants to do good,” Jackson Jr. explained. “I think that’s the best quality about him, that everything he does is done with the best intentions. Life just be like that sometimes. He runs into Mark, who is his boy. What a free spirit, that Mark.”
Franco plays Mark, a weed-smoking slacker whom he describes as “the polar opposite” of Jackson Jr.’s character. “I’m the guy who has a tattoo on his bicep of a little bird singing the words ‘Who farted?’ At the beginning of the film, he’s the kind of guy who skids his car into a handicap parking space,” he said.
“He’s not a very likable person from the get-go, but as an actor, I take that as a challenge. I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to use the rest of this film to help the audience understand who he is, where he’s come from, what his vulnerabilities are, so hopefully by the end, you can at least sympathize with him a little bit or even potentially root for him when you understand it’s all coming from a good place.’ He just has zero self-awareness.”
It’s the perfect Odd Couple setup. “With this, we had to be complete opposites at first; we kind of have to butt heads,” Jackson Jr. said. “That’s fun when you know the other person; now I can push him a little bit, now we’re going back and forth. We had a ball.”
Franco added that even when two actors are portraying adversaries, “You still need a certain type of chemistry. Because we know each other so well and work well with one another, we go into these scenes and really try to surprise each other and know that we can really do anything. It’s not gonna offend the other person, and you just understand each other’s rhythms. So it made it really easy. For me, in the past handful of years, I’ve really made a point of surrounding myself on set with people I like… it gives you the freedom to go nuts. You can take big risks, and nobody is going to judge you.”
Jackson Jr. credits Franco for making sure that the roles they played were believable and truly leaned into a friendship grown from strange circumstances. “We did a show back in the day for an app called Quibi — Rest in Peace, Quibi, we hardly knew you — and from there, Dave and I and our buddy Jimmy Tatro, we were all supposed to be lifelong friends,” he shared.
“Dave took the initiative of us going to dinner, getting to know each other and vibing with us once or twice a week. Our chemistry building happened pretty quickly, and we ended up really liking each other. Even today, we still have the group chat open. I completely credit Dave with that. It was something that I didn’t run into with my career at that point, so I liked it and dug it.”
Jackson Jr. extended his faith in Franco to new dining experiences and tried beef tartare. “Raw beef is crazy. I kinda jumped in the deep end and trusted him.”
New Experiences Reign
Jackson Jr. has always been ready to try new things, even when a role isn’t initially his. Recalling his work as Ike in Swagger, based on iconic basketball player Kevin Durant’s youth basketball experiences, he couldn’t turn it down because it mirrored his real life. “It was very interesting. From the jump, I was playing catch-up. The original lead was Winston Duke; I guess he got injured on set, and I had to jump in, but I had experience coaching youth basketball because of my little brother Shariff.” Jackson Jr. had many similarities with his character, whether it was “the love of basketball, coaching young men, and the level of responsibility you have to take on as a coach,” he shared.
“In that situation, basketball is the icing on the cake. The real thing that you’re doing is teaching life lessons to young men because at the end of the day, when it comes to basketball, out of 200 schools or whatever it is, 15 players per team, 60 get picked every year. You have to make sure that everybody leaves with something. So you’re teaching values, and the character understood that. He was having a daughter; I was having a daughter. It made too much sense.”
That role also let Jackson Jr. focus on himself. “It was something I needed at that point of my life. Before that, I was doing Den of Thieves and Godzilla, the action movie genre, and I like that I got to go back into drama and hone myself a little bit because in this business, you need things to center yourself sometimes. Swagger definitely did that for me.” Along with Idiots, he’s got a cartoon right now that he’s “trying to get off the ground, and it’s my first time doing voiceover work. It’s a new venture that I’m excited for. I might have to ask Dave for some pointers because he does a lot of voiceover work.”
Franco’s advice to Jackson Jr. and others considering voiceover work is to be as silly and dedicated as possible. “I feel like I know I’ve succeeded in a voiceover recording session when I walk away, and I’m embarrassed about how silly I got in that room. You have to have no ego; you just gotta let it all out and be as silly as you can possibly be.”
Keeping Indies Alive
Back at Idiots, “The main reason I came on initially was because of the writer and director Macon Blair. His first movie is called I Don’t Feel at Home Anymore, and if you haven’t seen it, put it at the top of your list,” Franco announced. “It really shows off his style: dark humor cut with real moments of violence. As soon as you lean back and think, ‘I know where this is going,’ he pulls the rug out from under you.”
He continued, “Another reason we were both excited is that this movie does harken back to those comedies from the early 2000s like Pineapple Express, Superbad, The Hangover — these are movies that really push the R-rating. They all have scenes that make the audience gasp and make you say that you can’t believe they went as far as they did. We wanted to bring the modern version of that to the table.”
Originally titled with a raunchier word, Blair penned the script in 2013, and Franco and the new cast helped move the project along after it was almost shot with a different cast in 2017, but the attempt fell apart after pre-production began. Having known Blair for over 10 years, Franco was a fan of the script and “wanted to help in any way he could,” coming on as producer and helping find financing for the film.
“It’s hard doing any independent film, but when I brought O’Shea on board, and then I brought our other actor, Mason Thames, on board, we had this really good package that we could now take out. We found a financier who was willing to give us just enough money, and we didn’t have many days to shoot. We didn’t have a ton of money, but we just had all the right people, and everyone was there for the right reasons. Every day was a sprint, and we’d get maybe two takes per setup, but everyone was having a great time. I think when you see the film, you can tell that we all genuinely like each other. The fun we had on set is reflected on screen as well.”
In addition to the committed performances from Jackson Jr. and Franco, Thames’ turn as a privileged, erratic social media influencer, a deeply committed Nicholas Braun as a SoundCloud rapper, Kiernan Shipka’s take on a hardened Eastern European stripper, and Peter Dinklage as a kidnapper of Thames’ character round out the characters that make up a gut-busting road trip from hell, which is exactly what Franco was seeking. “I like an R-rated movie that doesn’t hold back or tiptoe around anything. It’s gonna be offensive in moments, it’s going to be over the top, but it’s going to be a ride, and you’re definitely going to be talking to your friends about it.”
Jackson Jr. concurred. “The climate of the way things are, I get it. Taking risks financially, who wants to do that? I understand that studios and things like that, they want guarantees. So it’s easy to get an IP; it’s easy to get something that has its own fanbase already that you know for sure is going to at least hit those numbers, but there’s a surge right now in independent films,” he stated.
“As an actor, I look at independent films and think that the bells, whistles, and distractions aren’t there; it’s you, your crew, let’s get this done. As an actor, that’s when you get to sharpen your tools the best. There’s nothing to take their eyes off of you. It is pure form. So you need movies that have taken the independent route like Idiots to be successful so that the bigger studios will remember what probably got them there in the first place, which is taking risks on genuine stories from real life.”