‘A Simple Favor 2’ Director Paul Feig Promises Fans a “Bananas” Sequel: “As Delicious As the First One, and a Little More Nuts”
Paul Feig has finished a director’s cut of the untitled sequel to A Simple Favor, and he’s nervous.
“This has been a real nerve-wracking one,” the director confessed in a recent Zoom interview with Decider. “I’ve never done a sequel before. I know how much people love the first one.”
The 2018 thriller starred Blake Lively as Emily, a sexy, confident and mysterious high-powered career mom; while Anna Kendrick played Stephanie, the dorky, mild-mannered, stay-at-home mom, who gets pulled into Emily’s orbit. Though it wasn’t a big box office earner, it was a favorite “hidden gem” pick among critics and cinephiles, who loved the lush, darkly comedic vibes. This May, A Simple Favor began streaming on Netflix, and quickly shot to the top of the streamer’s Top 10 Movies list. The appetite for the sequel—which does not yet have a title or release date—is clearly there. And Feig already has evidence that fans will be pleased.
“We tested it last week,” Feig told Decider, adding that viewers should expect the sequel to release on Amazon in 2025. “I like to test early, just to see if everything’s working, and we tested through the roof. ” The test audience, Feig clarified, was mostly made up of “fans of the first movie, they were very, very happy.”
Feig, who is 61, has been a big name in Hollywood since he co-created the cult-class 1999 NBC comedy Freaks and Geeks with Judd Apatow. He’s perhaps still best-known as a director of crowd-pleasing, women-led comedies, like Bridesmaids (2011), The Heat (2013), Spy (2015), and Ghostbusters (2016). His latest film, Jackpot!—which will be released on streaming via Amazon Prime Video on August 15—is of a similar ilk: an action-comedy starring Awkwafina and John Cena. A Simple Favor, with its scandalous murders and twisty double-crossings, stands out as a different kind of tone for Feig.
In an effort to recreate that tone for A Simple Favor 2, Feig and screenwriter Jessica Sharzer, at the last minute, threw out their green-lit sequel script and started over. “I was seeing what people were writing about, how excited they were, and what they thought the movie’s going to be,” Feig said. “I’m just like, ‘I think what we have isn’t going to be what they are hoping for.’ Not that I want to try to match expectations, but I also don’t want to subvert expectations. I don’t like when movies do that. ‘Oh, you like that? Well, screw you, you’re going to get this!’ So, we threw out about 70 percent of that script and, during the [writers’] strike, rewrote it.”
In addition to Kendrick and Lively, the cast will see the return of Henry Golding, while Allison Janney joins the cast in a new role. Feig was tight-lipped when it came to plot details, but set photos published by People revealed Lively in a white dress and veil, filming a wedding scene in Capri, Italy. Lively’s lucky groom? Italian actor Michele Morrone, best known for his role in the steamy Netflix romance, 365 Days. “We needed this otherworldly guy for this role,” Feig said of Morrone. “Who would Blake fall in love with? We just had so much fun with him. We have a great Italian cast. Elena Sofia Ricci—she’s this legend in Italy, and she plays his mother.”
When asked for a word to sum up that tone of the sequel—after having once dubbed 2018’s A Simple Favor “delicious”— Feig went with “bananas.” He said, “This one’s delicious again, but it’s also bananas. It’s very beautiful, too, because it takes place in Italy. But it’s as delicious as the first one, and a little more nuts.”
