ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Trese spoke to Reverse the Curse stars David Duchovny, Logan Marshall-Green, and Stephanie Beatriz. It marks the second directorial effort by Duchovny, who also wrote the script, and will be available both in theaters and on demand on June 14, 2024.
“Reverse the Curse follows Ted (Logan Marshall-Green), a failed writer-turned-Yankees Stadium peanut slinger who moves back home after learning of the failing health of his Red Sox-obsessed father, Marty (David Duchovny). While Marty strives to make amends for his past, his health drops abruptly whenever his beloved Sox lose a game,” says the synopsis. “To keep his dad’s spirits up, Ted takes matters into his own hands and manufactures a winning streak with the help of a crew of dad’s neighborhood pals. In the process, Ted strikes up a bond with Marty’s charming ‘Death Specialist,’ Marianna (Stephanie Beatriz), and the prospect of a new love reignites his ambitions. An ode to the bond between father and son, this warm and witty film demonstrates how life truly belongs to the losers and that the longshots are the ones worth betting on.”
Tyler Treese: David, the novel that you wrote was titled Bucky F*cking Dent, and the name Reverse The Curse stays very true to Red Sox fandom. But what led to the movie title change? Was it just because of the curse word?
David Duchovny: Yeah, I mean, it was, it was hard. You said effing. It really has to do with the effing algorithm, which is if you type in various iterations of Bucky Effing Dent, if you don’t use the asterisk, there’s a lot of ways that it gets lost on it. And if you search for it, you might get lost. This is where movies live on more than they do in the theaters anymore. Obviously, this movie’s coming out in the theater, but it’ll have the rest of its life in a search engine somewhere.
It was relayed to me that this is a difficult name for a search engine, aside from having a curse word, which would get it buried in certain places as well. So, I want people to see the movie. I love the original title, but I also would prefer the people see the movie. So hence the name change.
Logan, I love your look in Reverse the Curse. You’ve got the big sideburns. I’m surprised you didn’t keep the full look. What did you like most about that 1978 aesthetic? Because I know you were born then, but you were too young to really experience it memory-wise.
Logan Marshall-Green: Man, why’d you gotta date me? [Laughs]
So, I mean, that was the allure. I think it was part of the look of Teddy and we didn’t just talk about how he looked. I mean, I think David certainly wrote him a certain way. So we wanted to lean into trying to gain a little weight for him and change a silhouette. I just started growing the beard out. I had already had short hair. Really, you should ask David about the wig because I think that was the bane of our existence, especially in post, in many ways.
But I remember being in David’s apartment, we were shooting a zero day. We hadn’t even started production. We were just trying to get some shots around New York. We were looking at this big old beard, kind of like what you’re wearing and what I’m wearing. I think we had looked at an old John Lennon photo where he had these beautiful buttons, and we wanted to go after that feeling that was left over in the sixties. He’s stuck in the sixties, Teddy. Even though we are in the seventies.
I do remember the hair hitting David’s apartment floor when we just went straight down and not in a good way, like, in a way Teddy would’ve done it. It was just so shocking. Then David was just like, “I think I like it,” and the rest was history. Then we got the wig on, and I think it really came together, you know? I really love that look, but I wouldn’t say that it exists in my closet.
Stephanie, you’re playing a death specialist who helps these terminal patients find peace, and a lot of heaviness comes with that role. There’s this great moment in the film where you say, “I don’t help people live. I help people die.” But we get to see a lot more to Marianna than just that side of her. What did you like most about Reverse the Curse’s approach to her as a character?
Stephanie Beatriz: I liked her sort of pragmatic but also weirdly joyful view about death and grief. David’s talked a little bit about this, and I should let him just talk about it, but there were some lines that he ended up adding to scenes that, to me, really felt like who she is. David, do you wanna talk about that a little?
Duchovny: Well, yeah, I mean there’s like a super condensed rom-com in the center of this movie, which is between Marianna and Ted. We don’t have 90 minutes to kind of go through all the ways in which that rom-com works. So there’s three or four scenes when mostly when they’re staking out, trying to find Marty’s old girlfriend, where you have to believe that these people get one another, are interested in one another, and fall in love. I had a weekend off after doing the first week, and I wasn’t satisfied that those scenes were carrying enough weight in that way. So I rewrote them.
One of the lines that I came up with was actually from my old X-Files days when I went to Quantico before we shot the pilot, or after we shot the pilot, one or the other. I went to Quantico, and I asked this agent; I don’t know if I told you this, Stephanie, this is where it comes from. I asked this agent, “What’s the most important thing you tell a young FBI recruit or agent?” He said, “Well, we got people that die from gunshot wounds that aren’t fatal. Because you see a bullet hit you, and you think I’m supposed to die now. We tell them, if you get shot, you don’t have to die.” That really became kind of a rallying cry for not only Marianna, Stephanie’s character, but for the whole movie.
There, there’s a really great line near the end that calls to that. It’s just beautiful.
And David, your character Marty, we see him literally living and dying with the Red Sox’s performance here. The son comes up with this hilarious idea to fake the results, and there’s the old men outside doing these fake rain and storms to create fake rain outs. How much fun was it just staging those scenes in Reverse the Curse? They’re really hilarious.
Duchovny: Well, it was fun to stage them but also nerve-wracking because I only had those guys for a day and a half. I had four scenes in the barbershop and that big scene making it rain outside the house. So I was under the gun. It also needed to be realistic enough that it could fool Marty. I had to somehow make it believable enough that this guy would believe it without seeming like an idiot, you know?
So it helps that Ted gets me stoned so that I might believe it. But it was really kind of stitching what was going on outside, which is funny and kind of a great image, but also somewhat unrealistic and what was going on inside, which is very realistic and strange and heartfelt. You have to kind of stitch those two worlds together.
Reverse the Curse is out in theaters on June 14.
