Josh Margolin Talks The Browsing Effect

Every so often, a movie comes along that might not actually be a nerd culture film but that features a handful of actors you recognize from things in the ComicBook wheelhouse. That happened last month with the release of The Browsing Effect, a romantic dramedy about online dating that featured actors from Limitless, The New Girl, The 5th Wave, and more.

Written and directed by Michael K. Feinstein (Match from the Past), the film stars Feinstein along with with Megan Guinan (CBS's "Limitless"), Josh Margolin (FOX's "New Girl"), Nikki Soohoo (Stick It), Drew Fonteiro (CW's "Jane the Virgin") and Gabriela Lopez (The 5th Wave). In The Browsing Effect, the seemingly endless possibilities of dating apps send a group of friends into a whirlwind of sex, jealousy, and self-doubt in this ensemble comedy that examines dating culture in the age of swiping. Margolin joined ComicBook.com to discuss the film, which is available now on SVOD services.

Has this been in incubation for a while? I did notice that in the last scene they reference the events of the film that's happening in 2016.

I'm trying to think of when we shot it, but yeah, it's been a minute. It's definitely a low budget indie, so there was a good amount of time once we finished in post, in trying to get everything together and make sure it can come together, and we had all our finishing funds and whatnot. But yeah, there you go. We're busted....It's a period piece. It's a period piece. That's what we'll go with.

This was a very indie, crowdfunded movie, but in the time between filming and release a lot of the cast have become a lot more recognizable. Is it kind of funny to look back on this movie now? And go "Yeah, three years ago when nobody had seen us?"

Exactly. It's been a funny little period. It's been nice; a lot of the people who are in it have been working and doing different things. Hopefully that timing is beneficial and is fun.

There's a kind of 90's indie feel to the whole movie, where it's very much an ensemble cast, but if you and Megan [Guinan] hadn't worked, the whole thing wouldn't have worked.

Something I really liked about it when I first read it was that ensemble element, and that it sort of has this large scope. I think there's something nice about that, too, when you're dealing in a really low budget indie. You can get size out of it laterally instead of vertically. It feels a little bit bigger than it would have, because there are so many characters and because each character gets sort of a whole arc. Even some of those bit characters that pop in from one scene end up coming back later and you figure out "Oh". It's like with the cop [at the end,] you were saying, "Oh, she became a cop."

I thought there was something nice about how the fabric of the world was very interwonven -- everybody sort of got their due, even these little pop-up characters who come back and we check-in with them, which I thought was a satisfying, interesting element to it. But yeah, I think it's definitely-the two major relationships are probably James and Melissa, and Ben and Gabriela. One, obviously, which has been together a long time at one end of the spectrum, and the other are brand new. There is a central group of friends, but we don't actually spend that much time with them as a group. There's maybe one or two scenes where you check in and see that they're all connected, but then we're off in those two camps for the most part.

Is there something fun as an actor playing a movie like this where there isn't really anybody in this movie who doesn't make at least one terrible mistake, and there's not really a straightforward villain? As much as you like certain characters, it avoids making their ex "evil."

Totally. I'm happy to hear that. What I appreciate about it is there is a-there is sort of a level of empathy and sincerity across the board. Everybody in it, you can sort of give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing their best and working from a place of good intentions despite their shortcomings. Which I think is always more interesting than somebody who's -- you know, this is your villain, this is your hero, and it's all sort of predetermined. No villain thinks of themselves as a villain, not that this movie deals in big tropes like that, obviously.

This is a relationship movie, not a superhero movie, but I agree with you. I think what makes it interesting, what makes it sort of winning, and feel real and nuanced, is that everybody is sincere and everybody is sort of trying to navigate this thing in a sincere way and trying to be happy, trying to find fulfillment. That sort of rang true in terms of what the experience with these apps is in life as well. That's not to say that there aren't probably some more genuinely villainous people out there on these apps, but I think-I think what attracted me from Michael's pitch, and to the characters, is that everybody messes up, everybody is very human, but everybody is trying their best.

On the note of superhero movies, since you mentioned them, has there ever been one of these things where you looked at it and went "I wish I was part of that," or something like that?

I'm a huge Batman fan. I'm a Batman guy, so I think anything Batman excites me. I also do love all that stuff. I love the Marvel stuff, I love the DC stuff. I don't fit anywhere in Nolan Batman movies, but in my dreams, I'm somewhere in those movies. I don't know who I would be cast as, and I honestly can't in good faith say I should be cast as anybody. But I love that trilogy so much that in a dream world, I'm somewhere in there. But I'd probably have to be the guy that tries to blackmail Batman, which would not be my first choice, but that's my probably the only part I could probably even throw my hat into the ring for.

Do you think that Ben and Rachel are a microcosm of what the movie's trying to do? Because it starts out feeling very binary and very kind of fractious, and by the end you're like "No, maybe the first third of the movie we didn't know what we were talking about."

Right? Everyone is kind of scattered, trying to find themselves, and then as a lot of events are sort of cropping up. There's a proposal, there's a break-up, there's all these things, and then the characters sort of settle into these new tasks. Characters sort of figure out what they want and reconnect. I hadn't ever thought about it that way, but that's an interesting way of thinking of it. You're sort of jumping from place to place and then from character to character, which hopefully makes it more interesting in how information is revealed. You're learning more about the dynamics, and learning about who is connected to whom as it goes as opposed to being sort of told everything in a traditional big group scene before we fracture off. So, yeah there is something to that, actually. I hadn't thought about that. That's an interesting thought.

Everything is kind of comes in bits and pieces, and comes in individual character arcs, which you wouldn't necessarily expect when both the film and also the trailer heavily feature like the documentary film crew that kind of feels to me those old ads for match.com, since that feels like a perfect place to do a big data dump.

Exactly. There's always an opportunity there to just be like, "let's lay out all our staff, let's figure out who's who, you get that out of the way, and then you move on." But I think there's hopefully something a little more vital and engaging in the fact that those are used relatively lightly. You get little bits and pieces, you get insight, but they're not relied upon to tell the story. They just sort of become the texture of it.

I feel like at the end of the day, it's always more satisfying to get there on your own and put the pieces together watching the action, not having everybody tell you. I feel like Michael used those in a smart, sort of subtle way that enhanced the story, but it doesn't rely on those.

The other kind of odd, fun, formalist element is the people who are either on the app or in the flashback kind of thing, where suddenly somebody is just in the room. I think your character had the scene with the leggy blond sitting on your desk.

Yeah.

What was you first thought when you saw that on the page in an otherwise pretty straightforward movie?

I'm trying to think what came to mind. I remember that was one of the things early on, where in the early version of the script I think there were only a handful of them. I think more were eventually added. I responded really positively to them. It felt like an interesting and expressive, fun way to communicate that experience in an otherwise pretty grounded movie. That was one of the things early on that actually really excited me about the script too, that you are living pretty much in this grounded, realistic world, but there are these feelings communicated through those absurd, heightened, surreal little touches throughout it. It didn't jar me as much as I thought it would, I guess is a good way to put it.

When I hear it out loud, I go "How do those...those don't sound like they're of the same ilk." But I think in the movie they come at the right emotional beat. They feel like a logical extension of just like "Oh yeah, that is sort of what that feels like." There's one actually that is not in the movie, where I'm on a date with somebody and she ends up killing someone, and then we went back. I think that one didn't make the final cut because it was a little too far in that direction, where people were like "Wait a minute, did they just kill somebody?" And that sort of threw everybody off watching the following scene.

But, I always liked that element. I always thought that was something that made it distinct, and I was always attracted to that. Somehow it felt natural, it didn't feel forced in the shape of the movie.

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