We can’t imagine a more timely and, not to be trite, important rom-com than You People. Directed and co-written (alongside Jonah Hill) by Kenya Barris, the creative force behind Black-ish and Grown-ish, You People mines endless humor and heart from facing the discomfort of having uncomfortable — and occasionally excruciating — conversations. Specifically, the kind that are needed to bridge cultural divides as fraught as the ones around race and religion.
The film serves as a modern take on the Romeo and Juliet formula, but instead of warring Montagues and Capulets we have the white, Jewish family of Ezra (Hill) and the Black, Nation of Islam devotee parents of Amira (Lauren London).
The film begs the question, ‘is love enough?’ The answer, it seems, is yes — but not without doing a lot of work requiring empathy and humility; things we all too often studiously avoid.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny star as Ezra’s parents, Shelley and Arnold. Both are clearly people with good hearts, the best of intentions, and most people would consider them to be highly progressive. And yet, they are painfully tone deaf and clueless in the ways we all are when it comes to lives that are not our lived experiences. They offer a fascinating critique of that all-too-real archetype, but also ask the audience tough questions about intent vs. impact — while offering plenty of laughs, sometimes while looking at the screen through your fingers in cringe-induced horror.
PRIDE sat down with the stars to get their take on their respective roles in the film, and why those feelings, both good and bad, are the point.
PRIDE: Julia, I want to talk a little bit about Shelley. She’s not a malicious person, and I think she has a good heart, but that doesn’t prevent her from causing real harm. This movie does a really good job of illustrating the ways that good intentions don’t negate negative outcomes. Can you talk a little bit about that?
JULIA: What appealed to me so much about playing this role was that she was so well-intentioned, almost overly so, if that can even be a thing. That’s why I could really sink my teeth into her desperation to do right. Therefore, when she gets her sort of comeuppance towards the end of the film from Amira — which is very well deserved — it’s devastating to her and you could even make the argument that it’s life-changing for her. So that arc, that journey, was an interesting one to play just as an actor.
David, one of my favorite scenes in the movie sees your character Arnold doing a cover of John Legend’s Ordinary People. How was it for you to shoot that scene and to show off your pipes?
DAVID: It’s pretty terrifying to do it. But to shoot the scene, it’s actually interesting, because we shot this movie during a particularly active time of COVID. We had a lot of precautions, [but] singing is actually probably the most dangerous thing you can do in times of airborne infectious diseases. So I had to come in early [and COVID] test a couple times, then I had to go record my performance. Then I had to lip-sync my performance without anybody there. And then they cleaned out the room for an hour after I finished. So it was weirdly solipsistic at a time when I really wanted to show off. I really wanted to give this performance [in front of people].
Courtesy of Netflix
There’s so many fun cameos in You People, like Rhea Pearlman, Elliot Gould, Hal Linden. How was the experience of filming with them?
DAVID: The weird thing is like, okay, we’re younger than them. But a lot of the younger people have no idea who they were. It’s very sobering in many ways. It’s also sad. And I wanted to say, these are great, great talents. That’s Elliot Gould standing there in the sun, waiting to go and do a couple lines. And I was like Jesus Christ. These are really great actors with legacies and histories. Not that they weren’t being respected. But it was just an interesting thing to confront at a stage in your career.
JULIA: [It was] delightful to have everybody together. It was an opportunity for us to just hear from them and their experiences, and it was an honor for us.
DAVID: You just want to pigeonhole them and say ‘tell me, tell me, tell me things.’
