Thank you to STX Entertainment for inviting me to attend a special Bad Moms press event.
Whenever you attend the press day for a new movie, there are a few things you can expect. You can expect interviews with the filmmakers. You can expect a few photo ops. At Bad Moms, we had all of that. And a bake sale.
Well, sort of. No one was actually asking for donations to purchase the treats. They did have a full bake sale set up. Cupcakes. Brownies. Donut holes. It was just part of the elaborate stage for our interviews. And if you’ve seen the Bad Moms trailer, you’ll get the bake sale tie-in.
Or, as Annie Mumolo put it, “It feels like a weird baby shower.” And I, having jokingly asked my friend Amanda to grab them for me just before the interviews started, offered up a store-bought donut hole to the stars. This launched Christina Applegate directly into the already famous bake sale scene. “No MSG. No BHA. No soy. No sesame. When I did that scene, they’re like, ‘can you add like five or six more?’ I was like, ‘I can barely get through the list of like 10 in my mind!’ I had to make up other weird things.”
So we’ll just add that to my list of accomplishments I’m weirdly proud of. I sat one person away from Steven Spielberg. I got retweeted by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I offered Christina Applegate a store-bought donut hole…
But that’s enough about me…let’s talk about Bad Moms. Specifically, what were their favorite memories of filming? According to Applegate, “Talking with all the girls in a circle in our chairs about politics and our children. That was the conversation every day. It went back and forth from being a mother and politics, mother, politics, mother, politics, mother, politics. They kind of go hand in hand because one’s going to form the future for our offspring as well.” Annie Mumolo’s favorite memory was a little different. “We all got the flu.” Which, of course, seems like an odd choice for a favorite memory, but she had her reasons. “Everybody was so supportive. I was very sick, and Jada was sick, and Christina sent this big box of hot toddy mix, and I drank the whole thing. I didn’t drink the tea. It was the whiskey. I thought if I’m going to die tonight, I’m going to go down good. I’m going down good.”
In the movie, Applegate portrays the terrorizing PTA President Gwendolyn. Does she know any Gwendolyns in real life? “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you, especially in my case. There’s a Gwendolyn everywhere you go, you know? There’s the mom that you look to and that you can’t believe that they like made those cupcakes and they had the time to make them with figurines and like sparklers coming out of them. And how do they do that? And then they always look good and smell good. I roll up to school with like hair that I haven’t washed in seven days, and my toenails are disgusting, and that’s the best I could do.” And when it comes to the kids? “My daughter hasn’t brushed her hair in three days. And you’re always a tossup of like brush teeth, brush hair, brush teeth, just teeth. Teeth is more important than brushing the hair before we get out of the house because that takes about 20 minutes of brush your teeth, brush your teeth, brush your teeth please. Put that down please. Please brush your teeth. Please brush your teeth. That’s my morning. That’s every day. That was today. That was 7:00 AM. Brush your teeth, Sadie. Brush them. Brush them. Brush them. Brush them. Brush them.”
“Between 4:30 and bedtime,” is Mumolo’s least favorite part of motherhood. “The dinner to the bath to the books to the brush your teeth to get in your pajamas to the bed, that whole thing to me, I need breaks in the middle. I go in my closet. I take a few minutes and breathing. There’s wine. There’s little mini breaks and checking out and then checking back in and then like regrouping and okay.” That’s probably why she related to the bar scene in the movie. “When they’re like, ‘Let’s be bad moms!’ And then they make the decision to, like, let go of all the pressure and the trying to be perfect and just, like, let’s take a minute for ourselves…it’s a wish-fulfillment thing.”
What should moms take away from seeing Bad Moms? For Applegate, it’s to cut yourself some slack. “I love this saying from my kid’s karate class, I never really even thought about it, but that ‘practice makes progress’ because perfection is not something you can obtain. And it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to fail in front of your kids. It teaches them that that’s how life goes and to not hold yourself to such insane, unrealistic standards in life because life’s going to throw crap at you all the time. It’s about how you get back up and how you keep moving on, and I think that’s what we’re trying to say in this movie.”
“Make sure to take time for yourself,” according to Mumolo. “I never did that, and it really took a toll on me. I always felt guilty in the beginning. Now I’m really good at being a bad mom, but I had to transition.”
You can start taking some time for yourself when Bad Moms celebrates “Bad Mother’s Day” on July 29 – the Mother’s Day you really want and deserve! Get tickets now: http://www.badmomstickets.com/
Stay in touch with Bad Moms on their Official Website, Facebook , Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
You can also check out my interview with Jon Lucas, Suzanne Todd and Scott Moore and and my interview with Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn.