If there’s one girl who knows her way around the role of brash party girl, it’s 28-year-old Bostonian Ari Graynor. As a severely inebriated best pal in “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” and more recently as a “friend with benefits” to Jonah Hill’s character in “The Sitter,” Graynor’s got the formula for chemically enhanced flake down to a science. But this time around, with “Pineapple Express” director David Gordon Green at the helm and Hill carrying the film, Graynor got to improvise her way through what was already a solid script.
“When you’re working with someone like Jonah, who is so talented and so smart and knows how to guide improvisations that work for a character and for the story, it’s much easier to loosen up and play around,” she says. “That’s the luxury of working with such talented people — that you have a guide … that you know it’s going to be guided down the right path. There’s an ease to it.”
One thing that was perhaps not so easy was the opening scene of the film, in which Hill’s character is, ahem, servicing Graynor in a very personal way.
“So, that’s always an interesting day at work — when you find yourself with a new friend’s head between your legs and 100 people standing around. Like, really?” Graynor laughs. “This is what I’m doing? I have some friends that are becoming doctors or social workers. They’re teaching kids in the Bronx and here I am with my legs spread, fake-orgasming, just trying to get through it without ruining the take. It’s one way to make a living.”
Graynor goes Broadway
Graynor is currently starring in the Broadway play “Relatively Speaking,” which features three one-act plays. Alongside works by Ethan Coen and Elaine May is Woody Allen’s play, “Honeymoon Motel,” in which Graynor stars.
“Woody Allen would be doing Woody Allen to me and then I’d be doing it back to him and then I’d run on onstage,” she says of her working relationship with the legendary director. “We’d have notes after every show in the theater. That in and of itself is worth its weight in gold. And, if I happen to find myself in one of his movies, then even better.”
