Rumer Willis plays it straight in ‘My Divorce Party’
With her name recognition Rumer Willis stands out among the female ensemble of “My Divorce Party,” a raunchy comedy available on VOD.
The eldest among the three daughters of a legendary Hollywood family – Bruce Willis and Demi Moore – Rumer returns to the screen as Ren, the sole sober celebrant at an all-girls boozy Joshua Tree weekend.
It’s a dizzy affair highlighted by the nutsy notion their friend Xan (Desiree Staples) has to burn her $100,000 cash divorce settlement in order to have real freedom. Instead, they try to spend the money and party hearty.
“A dear friend shared the script with me and thought that I could be perfect for this role,” Willis, 35, said in a phone interview. “I thought it was quite funny and really enjoyed that the script wasn’t just girls being funny but also needing to be sexy.
“That’s a trope Hollywood gets stuck on and sometimes there’s something just a bit more interesting when you remove that aspect of it.
“I hadn’t done a movie in a while,” she continued, “and here I was able to collaborate. I feel like I almost like rediscovered myself through comedy — and that was a delight.”
Ren, with flaming red hair, easily stands out. “Ren,” Willis said, “for all intents and purposes is the straight man of the crew. She’s sober and on the page was written very straight. But to me Ren is a little bit funky. She’s edgy. She’s not afraid. She definitely expresses herself with her wardrobe.
“I’m seven years sober, so what I really took from her backstory is that our friendships in the film go back 20 or 30 years. A few of us have known each other since college.
“A bit of the backstory was that there were times where Ren was the wild one and she really may have hurt some of her friends. Or been irresponsible. Or scared them with her drinking. But I didn’t go too deep into that.
“I ended up having so much fun because Heidi Weitzer, our director, gave us freedom to play. We were always adding in different ad libs and silly one liners. ‘Like playing volleyball’ is the best way I can describe it — you’re in an improv troupe where no one’s dropping the ball.”
Whatever’s next has to accommodate being mom to her one-year-old daughter. “My focus has really been on her.”
As to the biggest surprise of parenthood, “I know people talk about it. But the level of love that I have for this little being — you can’t really put it into words until it happens to you.”
“My Divorce Party” is available on streaming platforms