Guest House Director Sam Macaroni on How He Got Pauly Shore for the Lead

Last week saw Pauly Shore return to a leading role in a feature film for the first time in years. The actor, who became a household name after the success of comedies like Bio-Dome and Encino Man, continues to loom large in comedy (he manages the storied Comedy Store in Los Angeles), but still thinks of himself as an actor first and foremost, telling ComicBook.com recently that he was thrilled to get back into a role that wasn’t just either “Pauly Shore” or a thinly-veiled parody of his public persona. But even though the film — which centers on a listless slacker living in the guest house behind a rich couple’s home — feels very much like the kind of role that Shore used to play, it wasn’t written for him.

Instead, according to writer/director Sam Macaroni, the movie was actually written based on true events. Later, the script made its way to Shore, and the team-up seemed obvious.

“The way the movie came about is, it was 2015 and I was touring houses that I wanted to rent,” Macaroni told ComicBook.com. “I had a project and I needed to get into a bigger house. The realtor had taken me to this one house and it was gorgeous and beautiful and the price was low, and you’re always trying to figure out what the catch is — and sure enough there was a gust house there and the gentleman told me not to go look at it. So of course I had to. I ducked back there when he was taking a phoe call and there was a lunatic there who was living in the guest house. He had just decimated the place; it was disgusting, full of smoke and yellow walls and Kleenex. I don’t even want to know what all the wadded-up Kleenex was for because it was a lot of it. I remember fleeing from that place quickly and I remember looking to the person I was with in the car and saying, ‘There’s a movie there.’ So I went and wrote a draft, and then I brought in Troy Duffy, who directed The Boondock Saints, and my other friend Sean Bishop, and we fixed up the draft. Once I had the draft, there was a friend of mine who knew Pauly Shore. He told me I should ask Pauly to play one of the cops in this — in the original script there were two cops instead of one. I sent it to Pauly and I remember talking to him and he was like ‘This is a funny movie, bro!’ And I remember going like ‘holy s–t, that’s Pauly Shore. What am I doing? Why did I offer this icon a cop role?’ So I asked him if he wanted to play Randy, and he said, ‘give me 24 hours and I’ll call you back.’ He called me back and he had the script completely broken down and he was like ‘I am Randy, no one else can play Randy.’”

“I was just happy to get another shot of doing something which was not playing a version of myself, which I’d been doing for a while,” Shore told ComicBook.com. “I mean, it’s where I feel I belong. I love acting. I love working with a group of people and developing scripts, and I love the process. So it’s kind of like, in the ’90s I was in a circus — because that’s really what it is; when you go from movie to movie, or big project, It’s like a circus. There’s the caterer, there’s the hair and makeup person, there’s the wardrobe. You know what I mean? And then I left the circus, or the circus left me, and then now I’m back at the circus. So as I was on the set, back in that space, it felt like that was my home.”

Guest House debuted last week on digital on-demand platforms. The film will be available on DVD and Blu-ray in November.