Everything you know about Rob Schneider is wrong.
OK, maybe not everything.
Dissecting the somewhat frightening poster for “The Hot Chick” — a portrait of the comic as a female the way she never wants to be seen — he points out that while the avocado face pack, the cucumbers and the towel turban are all foreign objects, the chest in the photo is his own — “as ashamed as I am to admit it.”
“I actually thought we should have the real girls in the picture,” says Schneider, in Detroit to talk to journalists from throughout the Midwest about his latest — and funniest — movie.
“But the marketing geniuses came up with this.”
A man with depth
On this day, Rob Schneider looks exactly like Rob Schneider — permed hair and two-day beard, and in jeans, boots and a vest that appears to have come from the Abominable Snowman collection. But over the course of an extended conversation, Schneider reveals himself to be insightful, thoughtful, sensitive and well-read, not to mention well aware of the diverse reactions his persona evokes. He talks like a guy who’s grown as a comic, actor and writer, and maybe even as a human being.
On the surface, “The Hot Chick” is another dumb-Rob movie: Schneider plays a teenage girl, the hottest chick in school. Say what?
As a consequence of an ancient African curse and a lost earring — that’s really all you need to know — the gorgeous, snotty Jessica (Rachel McAdams) wakes up in the body of a dirty male derelict. Completely, like, you know, freaked out, she manages to convince her best friend April (Anna Faris of “Scream”), that he is really she.
A learning journey
With April’s help, Jessica spends the rest of “The Hot Chick” attempting to find her lost body while learning more than a few lessons about the difference between boys and girls and about being a good person.
“It started when Tom heard me mocking an old girlfriend,” says Schneider, of writer-director Tom Brady, who collaborated with Schneider on “The Animal” (“a good idea gone bad,” says Brady) and who wrote for “The Simpsons,” “Sports Night” and Schneider’s failed TV series, “Men Behaving Badly.”
“Tom thought there was a movie in the idea of a girl who becomes a man, but I was wary. I didn’t want it to be like `Switch.’ I didn’t want it to be mocking women or teenage girls. I wanted it to be more like `Big,’ or `Tootsie,’ with a lot of heart.”
Still, Schneider says, he could see the incongruous comic possibilities in going girl in the same way he’d believed “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” which most people figured to be a one-joke, one-weekend movie, could transcend its obvious premise (Schneider as irresistible male escort).
With Brady, he developed what he hopes is a comedy that can keep his core audience happy — there’s no shortage of booty and pooty gags — while alerting the rest of the world that dumb comedy can be fun, sweet and sort of smart.
“It’s not like we calculated it,” says Schneider, who is all too willing to give Brady and his co-stars credit for the movie’s most successful scenes and for making the funniest gags funny. “It’s just that the more movies you make, the more you learn and the more you want to try.
“We wanted to try to make a movie that respected the audience, and one that you would go back to at one point, instead of taking the laughs and moving on,” Schneider says.
“I think it had a lot to do with Rob falling in love,” says Brady, “although he would probably deny it.” (He doesn’t; Schneider says meeting the woman he is now married to was indeed what inspired him to make a romantic film.)
“All I know is that he was in this great place when we were shooting, and it just rubbed off on everybody,” Brady says.
“He was like a total sweetie,” agrees Faris, whose character April does a little falling in love of her own when Jessica, who certainly looks like a guy, begins turning into the sort of person she’s always wanted to be involved with: understanding, interested and more concerned with romance than sex.
“I was nothing like April when I was in high school. I didn’t have many girlfriends and I wasn’t part of a clique. But I understood her insecurities, and I understood why she would be attracted to Rob. What every girl really wants is for her lover to be her best friend,” she says.
“Rob was so intent on getting everything right,” Faris says. “He was always asking Rachel how she would do this or that, or how she would physically react to something. It was so funny, because by the end of the movie they had completely adopted each other’s mannerisms. He was trying to throw his hair back and looking at his butt in a mirror, and Rachel was belching and scratching herself.”
Schneider claims to be no more concerned about how the critics respond to “The Hot Chick” than he has been with his previous films, allowing only that he hopes critics won’t have a knee-jerk reaction to “the latest Rob Schneider foolishness.”
A serious side
“They rejected `Deuce Bigalow’ on face value, just on the premise and me alone,” says Schneider of the critical reaction to his 1999 box-office hit. “But it obviously had an appeal beyond that, and I was proud of the movie and its success.”
Still, Schneider — who colleagues insist was responsible for some of the smarter, edgier sketches when he was a writer at “Saturday Night Live,” admits that he would like to get a role like his friend and collaborator Adam Sandler’s latest.
Sandler, who has an uncredited cameo in “The Hot Chick,” as Schneider had in Sandler’s “Mr. Deeds,” earned critical praise in this fall’s “Punch-Drunk Love.”
“I was so proud of Adam for doing that because it took a lot of trust on his part. And he was great, and it doesn’t matter whether the movie is successful or not successful because he made everyone understand what he’s capable of. That’s all an actor wants to do.”
“When I was at `Saturday Night,’ I wanted to hang with the writers because they were the funniest guys — Jack Handey, (Al) Franken and (Tom) Davis, Adam. They were the guys. But then my and Adam’s characters, like the Copy Guy and Opera Man, became popular, and we started getting more face time, and that created a whole new round of tension with the cast members who had been around longer, and that helped create a bond between the two of us.
Moving on
“We both wanted to leave and do movies, but neither of us wanted to do `Saturday Night’ movies. I mean, 90 minutes of the Copy Guy? Even I wouldn’t want to watch that.”
His pal had better big-screen luck out of the box, while Schneider found himself “turned out in a codpiece and vulcanized rubber” as Sylvester Stallone’s sidekick in the deplorable “Judge Dredd.”
“You worked one day and you knew it was a stinker,” Schneider says. “But I caught on real quick about the pecking order when you work with a star.”
But Brady believes that if the “The Hot Chick” hits, Schneider will be able to use whatever clout he attains to “take it to the next level.”
