Andrew Rannells is down to dive into more onscreen drama and suspense with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively.
“Well, [director] Paul Feig is always coming up with something,” Rannells, 46, exclusively told Us Weekly of a potential third installment in the A Simple Favor film series at the New York City special screening of his new movie, I Don’t Understand You, on Monday, June 2. “He doesn’t do sequels. He sort of broke his own rule to do this sequel.”
As for whether he would return for a potential third movie? “100 percent,” Rannells told Us, adding that he hopes it would take place somewhere “as beautiful as Italy.”
Rannells returned as Darren, a friend of Kendrick’s Stephanie, in Another Simple Favor, which premiered on Prime Video last month. Set five years after the events of 2018’s A Simple Favor, the sequel sees Emily (Lively) coerce Stephanie into being the maid of honor at her Italian wedding under the threat of filing a lawsuit for the book Stephanie published about the first film’s events.
The wedding trip doesn’t go to plan, as drama stirs between Emily’s fiancé’s (Michele Morrone) family and their organized crime rivals, family members from Emily’s past bring new secrets to light and a murder mystery ignites.
Rannell’s latest movie, I Don’t Understand You, shares many similarities with Another Simple Favor, as both are set in Italy and follow characters wrapped up in dangerous and unexpected circumstances.
The film stars Rannells and Nick Kroll as a couple looking to adopt a child who travel abroad for a romantic babymoon. After winding up at a remote restaurant, things go south when they accidentally kill someone. Chaos ensues as they try to cover up the crime.
“Brian Crano and David Craig, who wrote and directed the movie, just crafted this really wild ride of a script that really, when I started reading it, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s like a rom-com for Nick and I, like a gay rom-com. And we’re in Italy and that’s fun and it’ll be real pretty,’” Rannells told Us at the film’s screening. “And then we started murdering people. I didn’t see that coming.”
He added, “I know the audience knows that there’s some murder involved, but yeah, it was a real twist. And it was a nice reminder that, you know what, gay people can kill people too. It’s equality. It’s all about equality.”
Rannells could relate to his character getting close to achieving a goal before it fell apart, telling Us that an ex of his broke up with him just days before the 2011 Tony Awards, where he performed and was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical for his role in The Book of Mormon.
“I still had to take him to the Tonys because I was so overwhelmed,” he recalled. “And, in retrospect, that was not the right decision, but I was so overwhelmed by I had to perform, and you’re doing the show during the day, and I was like, ‘You know what? Just still come with me, I guess. We both have these tuxedos.’ But it was such an exciting, exciting moment for me personally, professionally, and then [it was] heartbreaking.”
I Don’t Understand You is in theaters now.
