There are three truths in life. First, making friends as you get older gets harder. Second, male intimacy is a minefield. And third, mix the two together and you get the chaos of Friendship, the dark and touching comedy starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd receiving its U.S. premiere at South by Southwest.
According to writer/director Andrew DeYoung, the part of Craig, a suburban dad desperate for some excitement and male bonding in his life, was very much written for the I Think You Should Leave star, even through he had “no idea whether he’d want to do it or not.”
How do you write for Robinson, one of the most singular comedy voices working today? “I don’t know,” DeYoung said. The pair became friends in 2020 as DeYoung was starting writing. Increasingly he saw Robinson as his lead, and wrote for his voice. At the end of the year, he sent Robinson the script “and said, I wrote this for you. … Thankfully, he liked what I wrote.”
However, it wasn’t just the words on the page that won Robinson over, but a film that DeYoung referenced. “I told him, ‘I want to shoot it like The Master.’” Yes, the Paul Thomas Anderson film about a lost and secretly dangerous soul coming under the spell of a charismatic figure who proffers what he most deeply desires: friendship. DeYoung said, “It’s a movie I love and can return to a lot, which is rare, and the more I watch it the more I see it as a comedy. What makes PTA so brilliant is that there’s such deep humanity to his work that you could play it for drama, or you could play it for comedy, depending on whose hands you put it in.”
“Tim is really careful about making sure that nothing is played for a laugh. … The character he plays has to be operating at the top of their intelligence.”
But it wasn’t just the narrative balance of The Master that influenced DeYoung, but the urge to make a comedy that was genuinely well-shot and artfully composed. The dominating look of comedy has gone through cycles, from the hypersaturated action comedies and screwball antics of the Eighties and early Nineties to the multiplicity of multicamera studio sitcoms and the single-camera faux vérité backlash of the post-The Office era. Now, there’s a return to the considered composition of masters like Jacques Tati, who DeYoung called “one of the greats. Untouchable. … His aesthetic informs the work. It all comes from how best to serve the comedy and the ideas, and that’s what I’m working to.”
But DeYoung still needed that charismatic figure to balance out Craig. “I never knew quite who that would be,” he said. “If I’m doing The Master thing, my gut is to stay away from normal comedy casting.” That’s when his agent suggested Paul Rudd “and I go, oh my god, that’s perfect.”
Rudd has quietly become not simply a major star but also an almost unmatched survivor of all those changing eras and aesthetics of comedy. His career has flitted between studio moneymakers like Clueless, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and This Is 40, a stint as a season regular on the era-defining Friends, and edgier cult faves such as Wet Hot American Summer, Sausage Party, and a favorite of DeYoung’s, the Austin-made Prince Avalanche. When DeYoung cast Rudd as Austin, the TV weatherman who becomes the subject of Craig’s bro-y affections, he was keying in to both sides of that filmography. “He has one foot in Tim and Eric, and one foot in incredibly grounded superhero movies. He can carry so much and I couldn’t believe he was interested in this.” And DeYoung wasn’t interested in leaning away from his blockbuster role as Ant-Man as it arguably informs his relationship with Craig, who sees him as an almost mythical figure. “The Marvel aspect of this adds this whole meta-layer that was not intended but it was simply a bonus.”
Friendship
Festival Favorite, US Premiere
Sunday 9, 5:30pm, Alamo South Lamar
Tuesday 11, 11am, Paramount
Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle‘s SXSW 2025 coverage.
This article appears in March 7 • 2025.
