8. With a cast made up of six Groundlings alumni (Wiig, Mumolo, Rudolph, McLendon-Covey, McCarthy and Falcone), the improv was off the charts. “In the rehearsal process, you really got to know everyone’s characters before you’re shooting,” McCarthy told Entertainment Weekly. “Even if you didn’t use the specific information, you’d start to build this backstory. We had this history as the characters. You’d get more and more comfortable with how [you were] going to play off of each other. I just remember thinking, ‘If this is what making movies is, this is mind-blowing.'”
Given free rein to play, “I’ll be honest, I can’t remember what was scripted and what came out in improv anymore,” Rudolph said. “By the time we actually started shooting, we were all aware of the creative process: Come in, read the scenes, and then improvise. There was a stenographer who was typing everything that we were improvising. Then we’d come back and there’d be new pages.”