Will Ferrell Talks Balancing Heart and Humor With Reese Witherspoon in ‘You’re Cordially Invited’
Amazon Prime Video‘s newest dream team, Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, have teased audiences with what to expect from their upcoming comedy You’re Cordially Invited.
Launching on the streamer worldwide Jan. 30, the movie from writer-director Nicholas Stoller follows Jim (Ferrell) overseeing his daughter’s wedding and Margot (Witherspoon) her younger sister’s. But things go more than awry when the ceremonies are accidentally double-booked into the same — and intimate — wedding venue on an Atlanta island.
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“You can expect a rollercoaster ride,” said the comedy king, who was most recently the subject of a Netflix road-trip documentary with long-time friend Harper Steele. Ferrell spoke alongside his new co-star Witherspoon at a London preview of the film Thursday night. “Nick here came up with an amazing premise and in some ways, it feels quite familiar.”
“There are a lot of wedding movies,” he continued, “but this was just really interesting and funny that it’s two weddings booked on the same day at a destination we can’t escape, we can’t run away… It’s a place that has a lot of nostalgia and meaning for both of our characters, and that sets up the stakes where we’re willing to basically rip each other’s heads up to defend the turf.”
He turned to Witherspoon as he added, “My daughter is getting married. Your sister’s getting married. It’s as funny a movie as you’re going to see in terms of just letting loose and letting it rip, but at the same time there’s lots of heart. We’re both dealing with potential loss.”
“And we’re at weddings where it divides people into two — people are either really happy for the people getting married or thinking about themselves, saying, ‘My life sucks.’ So it kind of explores all of that,” he said.
Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner and Jimmy Tatro round out the cast of You’re Cordially Invited. Witherspoon’s recent credits include her Apple TV+ series The Morning Show and the 2023 romantic comedy Your Place or Mine. Ferrell voiced a role in 2024’s Despicable Me 4 as well as starring in Will & Harper.
During a conversation last year with The Hollywood Reporter about the landscape for comedy films, Stoller said that he appreciates that such projects tend to be ones that audiences enjoy revisiting. The filmmaker is known for such movies as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors, and co-creating the recent Apple TV+ series Platonic.
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