Page 52 - Peter Farrelly Issue

Daniel Monks and Peter Farrelly on the set of Ricky Stanicky
story line’s going, but that you could tap into that data- base for any project, whether you’re calling it out as a disability or not. Just exactly what you said. There might be talent in there that happens to be an amputee or happens to be blind and you know what? That’s a young, attractive woman coming into a room. That’s our hope, that it gets picked up beyond just the disability factor.
Farrelly: The disability shouldn’t just be—let me rephrase this. You shouldn’t just think of disability when you have a role for somebody who’s disabled. They could play any role.
Cooper: That’s what I see you do in your movies.
Farrelly: I try to. Sometimes we fail, and we did fail, like, on our first movie, “Dumb and Dumber.” We never had anybody with a disability in it. And I got a lot of shit from my friend Danny Murphy, who was a quadri- plegic friend of mine. At the premier I came out and I was embarrassed. He said, “You didn’t have one person in that entire movie with a disability, except for the kid, who’s disabled, the kid in the wheelchair.” And I was really embarrassed. I said, “I’m never doing that again.” And we didn’t. All I was thinking was that I was trying to get a movie made for nine years, and I didn’t think straight. But in any case, I would never make that mis- take again. And, by the way, as I said, because it’s a bet- ter movie if there are people with disabilities because
that’s the world. And I want people to be in a real world, not a fake world.
Cooper: Yeah, I remember the first—it might have been Eddie Murphy’s first role where he was in that pissed- off moving-that-furniture scene.
Farrelly: Yeah, that was in “There’s Something About Mary.” I started putting him in—after her gave me shit, I said, “First of all, we’ll start with you next movie,” and that was “Kingpin.” And then we started expanding. I saw a movie the other night, “Daruma.” Are you familiar with this?
Cooper: Oh, sure.
Farrelly: I saw it the other night, and Tobias Forrest is the lead, and John Lawson. And that’s the kind of movie that will move the needle. It stars people with disabili- ties, but it’s not about that.
Cooper: I didn’t get to go to the premier. Farrelly: Fantastic!
Cooper: I’m looking forward to seeing it. We wrote about them back in 2019 as they were trying to get the film produced and all the challenges, as you would imagine, getting that made. I’ve known John for a long time and Toby for a long, long time. He’s in that system
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