“Blake and I said, ‘How about men’s suiting?’” “Paul walks around in three-piece suits every day,” the film’s costume designer, Renée Ehrlich Kalfus, told Vanity Fair in 2018. She dressed like she’d just stepped out of Brooks Brothers, which is fitting, since her inspiration was Feig himself. While promoting the film (pulling stunts like following only Emily Nelsons on Instagram), Lively strictly wore every tux she could get her hands on. Oh, the pantsuits: They’ve taken on a dapper life of their own. His influence is all over the film, down to the pantsuits Blake Lively wore. “Feig said … he wanted so much more from the way that people thought and gravitated to it,” Bennett says. That’s what it makes it pop - but also hard to discuss in quippy reviews and passing conversations.
Feig told Decider just as much in August: “In many ways, it’s my favorite movie I’ve made.”īy bridging camp with serious acting and a thrilling plot, A Simple Favor is both genre-filled and genreless. “It was very clear to us that Paul is as big of a fanboy of this movie as we were,” Bennett says. “If the queer audience had realized the movie was playing to them more specifically, they could have more passionately turned out and more fervently talked about it on the internet,” Crucchiola says.Įven though Bennett, Crucchiola and Grace only recently launched the podcast, the hosts managed to book Feig to talk about his film.
It’s an A Simple Favor promotional shot on her Instagram: She’s clad in a full suit and “topping” a chiseled naked man on the kitchen counter while holding a martini. In certain queer circles, Lively’s most famous fashion moment wasn’t at the Met Gala or on the set of Gossip Girl. “There was a key missing element: the humor not being played out in the marketing,” says screenwriter (and New Girl stan) Alanna Bennett, who dissects the film with fellow hosts Jordan Crucchiola and Christina Grace on A Simple Podcast. Lionsgate billed the film as a thriller with a 1950s housewife aesthetic, but the promo was a fatal mistake: A Simple Favor debuted in the wake of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, which already satisfied the public hankering for neo-noir women-on-the-run stories.
Longtime fans of the film believe this snafu is a lesson for Hollywood: that gays and girls are always its best marketing tool.