After weeks of Wednesday dominating the Netflix charts, Emma Myers is feeling overwhelmed. The young actor, who plays Wednesday’s sunny roommate Enid in the gothic mystery series, is seeing co-star Jenna Ortega’s dance moves everywhere. “I keep hearing that Lady Gaga song everywhere. I can’t avoid it!” she tells Tudum. Fortunately, Myers will be able to hide away from the world for a little while. She’s just joined the new McG comedy Family Switch, alongside Ed Helms, Jennifer Garner and The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers star Brady Noon. Hopefully no one is playing “Bloody Mary” on set.
Family Switch falls into that grand tradition of family comedies: the body-swap film. When the Walker family meets a mysterious astrological reader, they find themselves waking up in each other’s bodies — on a day that holds a crucial event for each of them. So Myers’ audition was a little untraditional: She had to prove her skills as an impressionist were up to snuff, impersonating the castmate that she would be swapping bodies with in the film. “I did the ‘To be or not to be’ monologue [from Hamlet], and I thought it was the stupidest thing ever,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘This is such a bad impression, this is never going to happen.’ But apparently they liked it!”
Myers is preparing to play a much different character, trapped in her own body. It’s a performance that takes more than just simple vocal mimicry. “I actually have a movement coach,” she says. “I’ve been doing exercises with her, and we kind of play around with how different characters would act and a lot of improv and a lot of mimicking each other. There’s a lot of practice that goes into it, which is definitely helpful for me.”
Fortunately, Myers has plenty of experience observing the famous cast members playing her parents. “I’ve seen The Office multiple times all the way throughout,” she says of Helms. And as for Garner, Myers has another body-swap comedy in mind. “Every time I’d go over to one of my friend’s houses we’d be like, ‘OK, what movie are we gonna watch tonight?’ ” she says. “Oh, how about we watch 13 Going on 30? Oh, we watched that last time, but come on, we gotta watch it again!’ We’d always watch that movie.” Just call it research.
Family Switch is currently in production. McG (The Babysitter, the Charlie’s Angels films) directs from a screenplay by Victoria Strouse with revisions by Adam Sztykiel, inspired by author Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s book Bedtime for Mommy.
