Amy Landecker Talks ‘For Worse,’ ‘Transparent,’ and Balancing Drama with Comedy

Amy Landecker’s newest film, For Worse, is a romantic dramedy based on a transformative period in Landecker’s life.

Landecker plays a newly divorced mom navigating a wild weekend with a new hot fling as she tries to reclaim her youth. However, when things fall into place during that weekend, everything changes for her.

In addition to starring in the film, Landecker is also the director. I recently had the chance to speak with Landecker about finding the fine line between dramas and comedy films, how Prime Video’s Transparent served as inspiration, and much more. (You can watch the full interview below.)

With dramedy films, there is often a fine line when it comes to balancing drama with humor. With For Worse, Landecker said that the best way to maintain this balance was by rooting the story in realism.

“I think that the key is that both stay very grounded in reality in some way,” Landecker explained.

“First of all, you have to have the most incredible comic actors. That’s very important,” she laughed. “So you hire Ken Marino, Simon Helberg, and Bradley Whitford.”

“You let them play as well. Hannah Pilkus, who has like three lines and just slays in this movie, gets this huge laugh. She sort of comes and goes like a whirling dervish.

“I think that’s really, honestly, the most important thing.”

Landecker also explained how some actors try to balance being comical and emotional. “People like [Missi Pyle] and Gabby Hoffman, who can do both. They can be very deeply emotional, but they can also be absurdly funny,” Landecker said.

Even if it’s like a very heightened reality, it’s still recognizable to people. I think you can go into something deeper and come out of it quickly with people coming along with you.”

One of the biggest inspirations that helped Landecker produce For Worse was Prime Video’s Transparent, a series Landecker starred in. “I honestly feel like if this film works at all, it’s because of that show and what I learned on it,” Landecker said.

I have never had an experience before or since like that, where Joey Soloway, who created Transparent, first of all, hired actors who are completely open to walking in one day and going, ‘We’re not going to say this, throw that away. We’re going to do this.'”

However, Landecker believes in one other lesson that is important when it comes to directing. “I think probably even more important than any of that is the idea that everybody on set is a part of the scene,” Landecker noted.

“If you are a background or you’re the sound guy, you are as important to what’s happening as what’s in front of the camera, and that everybody gets acknowledged every day.”

“When you have that environment, everybody puts down their phones, talks to each other all day, takes pictures, and is having a great time,” Landecker said.

Watch the full interview with Amy Landecker below:

Given how For Worse is based on Landecker’s real-life experiences, there are some scenes that stand out more than others. Some of those scenes feature acting classes, which were based on Landecker’s own experiences with commercial work.

“I took an acting class when I was already pretty well established,” Landecker recalled. “Harkening back to my early days, I did take a commercial acting class. We were given a copy that was not commercial.”

“I have this commercial in the movie around a product called ‘Aquaxie,’ which is a moisturizer for dry vaginal issues in menopause. And I can write that, act that, and produce that commercial because I’ve done so many commercials in my acting career.”

Landecker also looked back on how this period in her life influenced those scenes in For Worse.

“Commercial work is a big part of how actors in this country can survive and make money, but the class was made up of almost exclusively friends and actors that I knew who would be very open,” Landecker said.

“Any actor you hire to do an acting class has taken an acting class, except for probably Gabby Hoffman, who’s our teacher,” Landecker laughed. “She’s probably never taken an acting class, which is funny, and she nails it!”

“She does such a beautiful job of grounding that into something where it’s a cliche.”

Another scene in For Worse that is one of Landecker’s favorites comes in the second act. In this scene, Amy finds herself in a bathroom after being overcome with emotions and decides to do some breathing exercises.

Landecker broke down the biggest challenge that came with filming this scene.

“One of the challenges of that scene is that the line is so small between comedy and reality,” Landecker explained.

“[In the film], I’ve had a really bad experience at this wedding party, and my ex-husband told me that his new girlfriend does these like calming videos. I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, go to hell.'”

“In the bathroom, I’m sort of like, ‘Oh, you know, maybe I’ll try it.'”

“At first, she comes at it to mock. Then, she falls into this somatic exercise that she’s being led through, which, just a bit of trivia, is Anjali Cabral, who was actually the person whose wedding I went to twelve years ago, where I behaved badly and thought of making a movie about.”

Although this scene in For Worse proved to be a challenge for Landecker, she received high praise from her co-stars for maintaining that tonal balance.

“The biggest compliment is that [Bradley Whitford] said to me, ‘You know, there’s not a lot of actors who can do what you just did,'” Landecker recalled. “I feel like that’s a huge compliment.”

“My goal is to be like Kathryn Hahn. I’m not as good as her, but she’s my goals as an actor where you can, within a line, go from being comedic to actually crying and then back again.

“It really makes me happy that people have been mentioning that scene, because I actually didn’t know if it made sense to anyone at all,” Landecker laughed.

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For Worse is now playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles and will expand on March 6.

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