Bobby Cannavale and Rose Byrne star as Max and Jenna in Tony Goldwyn’s Ezra. The film is currently playing in theaters. We talked about their approach to telling this story, what messages they took away from the project, their characters, and working with William A. Fitzgerald.
EZRA follows Max Bernal (Bobby Cannavale), a stand-up comedian living with his father (Robert De Niro), while struggling to co-parent his autistic son Ezra (introducing William Fitzgerald) with his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rose Byrne). When forced to confront difficult decisions about their son’s future, Max and Ezra embark on a cross-country road trip that has a transcendent impact on both their lives.
“For me, it was just to tell the truth, like have it be emotionally authentic. The trickiest thing honestly, for me, was finding the tone of the film, because humor is a terribly important aspect of this movie, it’s very funny, but it’s not jokey, even though Max is a stand-up comic. The humor is just human and to make sure the humor was always a part of it, without it being cute or suddenly crossing that line into something where we’re sort of softening the edges of the reality of the movie,” the director/producer expressed to me. “So it was that balance between light and dark, and that counterpoint that just is a beautiful part of life in all of its craziness, but can sometimes, as storytellers, we can drift too much into one lane or the other.”
“I liked where this guy [Max] was at this particular moment in his life. I think great drama, the best dramas occur when we’re at the most pivotal moment in these characters’ lives, right? The most make-or-break moment of their lives. That’s good drama to me and I thought Tony succeeded with that, right? Here’s a guy who makes his living writing and telling jokes, and he is not in a place where he can tell jokes, right? And yet that’s his job. So I thought it’d be interesting to see a stand-up on stage, go through that, and not necessarily be funny. Yet he’s still at it, and he’s still opening a vein in front of people. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a heroic character,’ and I just saw things in it that weren’t conventional to me in regular moviemaking parlance,” Cannavale explained. “Then, you add to it that we’re going to cast a neurodivergent actor, well that was entirely new for me and I thought, ‘I’d like to be a part of that.’ And so, it was very exciting to work with a young actor who’d never done it before, who is on the spectrum, who just blows us away. He’s just so honest, and he’s just wonderful and it was a really rewarding experience in my life to get to shoot that movie with him.”
“Jenna has a lot of practical decisions she has to make and I think emotionally it’s very challenging because it’s about the safety of her child but also the safety of her husband and the family,” Byrne shared. “That part of the story was really tricky and we really sort of, threading that needle, I think, was we had many conversations about that, really tracking the logic and the emotional logic of that. So I feel like that was a big challenge, trying to get that right ‘cause it’s a lot of grey areas and figuring out, but that’s exciting, just as long as you can make sense of it emotionally, I think, was the most important thing.”
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