D’Arcy Carden and Jake Johnson had to have phone sex while filming their newest indie flick, “Ride the Eagle”, and it was surprisingly… not awkward.
“All my stuff with Jake obviously is on the phone and he was nice enough and lovely enough to just be on the phone with me whenever I was shooting,” Carden told ET Canada. “I would literally call his cell and it was that simple. You’d think it was movie magic or something, but it’s literally just me calling him and him being like, ‘Okay, hold on, let me step away from my kids to do this scene with you really quick.’”
“Actually, filming that phone sex scene could have been super awkward and sort of embarrassing and terrible truly,” Carden added. “But it was Trent [O’Donnell] directing me, who I know and love and a super, super small crew, and it was very comfortable. I think I was just trying to make the crew laugh and make Jake laugh on the phone. It didn’t feel embarrassing.”
Due to COVID-19 safety regulations, Carden and Johnson were never on set together, a career experience Carden describes as “weird.”
“Jake and I talked about it a lot before because it is scary to act by yourself and it feels unnatural and a little embarrassing and the truth is the whole point of acting is to react off of somebody, sure there’s one person shows, but the thing I love about acting is working with someone and seeing what they come up with and how that affects what I’m going to do,” Carden said. “That’s the whole give and take and beauty of it so this was a whole different thing, and I think Jake and I sort of had to talk each other down a little bit.”
“Ride the Eagle” follows Johnson’s free spirited Leif as he learns his estranged mother Honey (Susan Sarandon) died and left him a “conditional inheritance.” Before he can move into her picturesque Yosemite cabin, he has to complete her elaborate, and sometimes dubious, to-do list, such as calling the ex-girlfriend “who got away” (spoiler: the character is played by Carden).
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Though that scene was comfortably intimate, Carden notes she and Johnson barely knew each other before diving into this project.
“I am a huge fan of Jake,” she said. “I’m a huge ‘New Girl’ fan and all of his movies. I’m just a big Jake Johnson fan. My husband had worked with him for a couple years a few years back so he knew him so we were sort of in the same world, but we had only met for a brief moment at a party one time.”
“We didn’t know each other, we weren’t friends, but I think Trent just knew that we would get along and Trent knows both of us so well individually so he knew this was going to work, which was great because Jake obviously trusted him hiring someone he had barely met,” she added.
Decal will release “Ride the Eagle” in theatres, on-demand and digital on July 30.
