Melissa McCarthy was hovering six feet above Los Angeles, in a glass tube, wearing a helmet and goggles. Her limbs were spread out like a starfish, with her legs bent at the knee as if she were a teenager reading on her stomach on her bed and her arms bent at the elbow so that had she been upright, they would have made the shape of a cactus.
Originally, we were scheduled to go to a rage room, which, I think, is a place where you can beat things to death in a disturbing, passive-aggressive cry for help. Neither of us had ever been to one, but honestly, by the time it was suggested to me, it sounded like the cure of and for the century. I’ll probably never know. The local rage room was open for only 15 minutes on a Thursday, which we all found strange because, considering the state of the world, a rage room should maybe be open around the clock as a public service. (“You need to have them like Starbucks,” McCarthy told me later.)
Her publicist tried, but ultimately the rage room wouldn’t open early, not even for Melissa McCarthy, and she called to tell me that we would be changing to indoor sky diving at the iFly at Universal Studios. “I hope you see the metaphor here,” her publicist said to me. “She’s flying, she’s up high, she’s soaring.” I nodded and dutifully wrote this down.
McCarthy arrived. She’s tiny, just 5-foot-2, and her face is a shiny, magnetic sparkle — its resting expression is cheerfulness, its cheeks are dimpled, its inquisitiveness is somehow loving. It draws people energetically near it so that when people passed her on Universal City Walk, something forces them to turn toward her, having no idea why, only to then find out that she actually was the actress Melissa McCarthy. She is prone to wide-eyed expressions of surprise; she is prone to making her mouth as round as her eyes as she listens in awe or surprise or delight. It’s a staple of some of her Midwestern-seeming characters, a delighted incredulity when faced with the modern world.
A tall, athletic man who worked for iFly led us to change into purple jumpsuits that were made out of some environment-defiant mixture of nylon and other proprietary materials and forced us to watch an instructional video about all the safety and fun we were going to have. McCarthy was excited. I tried to be, too, but truthfully, I was still kind of bummed. A rage room! I could really find my way through a rage metaphor right now. I asked her why she wanted to do it in the first place. Was she as angry as the rest of us? She said it sounded fun. I asked her how she chose indoor sky diving as a runner-up. Was she ready to jet off and leave this earth and colonize another planet and start over like the rest of us? No, she said. The rage room was closed and this also sounded fun. I blinked.
I sat on deck, watching her take her turn. It had been a long time since I’d participated in an overt magazine stunt whose purpose was to set a scene for the opening paragraph of a story, to crystallize and illuminate a person for the reader and create a metaphor through which to weave a story — it’s just not done anymore. And I didn’t want to waste time flying just because it’s fun when we had a lot to talk about: The way the world has changed comedy, the grave wounds that make somebody go into this weird profession.
I looked from my notebook to the tube to my notebook to the tube, and yeah, I guess she was flying, she was up high, she was soaring. Then I noticed her face beneath her helmet: Her mouth and eyes open as round as her dimples, her face an expression of unmitigated wonder and joy, and there beyond the glass, I noticed for the first time just what a good time she seemed to be having.
This winter, McCarthy, 48, sat in a dirty Midtown apartment in Manhattan, thinking about the good old days. The day’s set was an apartment decorated to look like the journalist/forger Lee Israel’s 1980s Upper West Side apartment, for her new movie, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” The shoot took place during the same era when McCarthy lived in New York as a young woman, back when New York was gross and not as polished and filled with finance bros (which is its own kind of gross) and perfect. Was that what was making her feel so nostalgic?
For more read the full of article at The Nytimes
