And to think, it all started with a free pretzel.
Inspiration can come from the most unexpected of places and
that was certainly the case with Melissa Rauch and her husband Winston who,
years ago had gone to a mall in New Jersey and were given a free pretzel.
“I was on this show called Best Week Ever which was on VH1
and was starting to get a bit of success,” recalls Rauch, in Chicago recently
to promote her new film, The Bronze. “So we went back home to visit my
parents and we went to the mall and got a hot pretzel. The manager recognized me, said he liked the
show and gave me the pretzel for free.
But later when the show was canceled and I was out of work, I went back
home, visited the mall and he wasn’t as nice as before. I had to pay for it this time and it got us
thinking about how fickle fame can be.”
While telling this story, Rauch displays the directness and
sense of excitement her television doppelganger Bernadette Rostenkowski does on The Big Bang Theory, a show she started appearing regularly on during
its third season, making her a regular household visitor for millions around
the world. Her new film, The Bronze, which she co-wrote with her husband deals with a figure skater named Hope
Gregory, a girl from a small town in Ohio who’s having a hard time dealing with
the fact that her glory days are long gone.
Foul-mouthed, abrasive and immature, she bares little resemblance to
Bernadette. I asked her if writing this
character was a conscious effort to distance herself from her television role.
“Not really,” she says after a thoughtful pause. “I think
there are more similarities between the two then people realize. Bernie has an outward sweetness but when
she’s pushed, another side of her comes out. She’s very assertive and plows
ahead until she gets what she wants.
With Hope, she’s just more open about how she feels. She wears her anger and confusion on her
sleeve and that’s what holds her back.”
One of the most striking things about the Rauch’s script is
how uncompromising it is in making Hope such an unlikable character. This
includes giving her a vocabulary that would have given Richard Pryor pause. I jokingly asked Rauch, “Do you kiss you
mother with that mouth?”
“Actually, she hasn’t seen the movie yet,” she replied with
a laugh. “You know I grew up a very
liberal household. I was watching HBO
comedy specials, memorizing routines Whoopi Goldberg did and then going into
school to do them for show-and-tell, when I was seven years old. Needless to say, my parents got a phone call
after I dropped the F-bomb a time or two.
But I was so shy and this was really the only time I would open up and I
think that’s why they encouraged my performing.”
At the core of The Bronze is the sense of displacement
that occurs when your performing days are over and often the lack of support
that accompanies this period in an actor or athlete’s life. With such a wide variety of arenas to set
this story in, I asked her why she and her husband put the world of gymnastics
in the spotlight.
“First, we love gymnastics and go and watch competitions all
the time. I find it to be a rather
cutthroat and cruel world. You watch the
Olympics and the announcers will say, ‘She’ll have to settle for the
bronze.’ This is ridiculous! They’re not settling, they’re the third best
in the world! So we thought it would be funny to look at this character who was
so proud of winning the bronze try to deal with a situation when the public’s
attention moves on to someone else.”
As far as attention is concerned, those who see The Bronze are likely to be talking about a scene that’s had audiences buzzing since the
film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
At one point Hope hooks up with her former partner and ex-gymnast Lance
(Sebastian Stan) and the sex scene they engage in resembles an elaborate
gymnastics routine rather than any traditional lovemaking. It’s the highlight of the film, one that took
three days to choreograph and a half-day to shoot. “We didn’t have a lot of time and had to move
quickly,” Rauch recounts. “There is more
of Sebastian in it than me, as I had a body double, which was hard to find what
with my physique. But we tracked someone
down who was a Cirque de Soleil performer and she was amazing. I thought the
scene came off really well and I would really love to have my parents see it in
a theater, put a camera in front of them and record their reactions. That would be really funny.”
What with the continued success of The Big Bang Theory, (I’d be on that show forever,” the actress says), it seems as though Rauch is
quite secure as far as her place in Hollywood is concerned. Yet, the many years
of having little success is always in the back of her mind. However, her experience with The Bronze, has left her with a way to cope if the gravy train were to come to an end. “I love writing and Winston and I are working
on a new project for HBO. It’s so
therapeutic to be able to create a character from scratch. I like having the control you do when writing
because as an actress, often times you have no control at all as far as your
career is concerned.”
This article appears in Mar 17-22, 2016.
