Guest House: Sam Macaroni and Aimee Teegarden On the Evolving Role of Straightwomen in Comedy

Earlier this month, filmmaker Sam Macaroni‘s new film Guest House hit streaming platforms. The comedy, which stars Pauly Shore as a quasi-vagrant crashing in the guest house of a rich couple, gives a lot of screen time to the dynamic between Blake (Mike Castle) and his fiancee, Sarah (Aimee Teegarden). The movie is, intentionally, a bit of a throwback to ’90s comedies — but one of the things that had to change, at least a bit, was the portrayal of Teegarden’s character. In the new film, she’s supportive and just a little frustrated, an evolution of the character archetype she plays.

You needn’t look any farther than the trailer itself to see what that archetype is. The way it was cut makes Sara look a bit humorless and cold, rather than simply overwhelmed by the chaos around her. And that take on the part was what both Macaroni and Teegarden wanted to make sure they steered fairly clear of.

“I would just go ahead and say that I based her off a lot of people in my life,” Macaroni explained. “As a guy that’s always trying to figure out, ‘do I want to still be young? Or do I need to be old? Do I need to be responsible?’ I’ve got a little bit of Blake in me and a little bit of Randy in me every single day. She’s a tough character to write because she’s his partner in life, and she’s watching him flip, but he’s also going down this road that he thinks he needs to go down. So she’s there to try to stop him from harming himself. But at the same time, she’s a friend. It’s a tough question. And I just think that [Aimee] did such a good job.”

Teegarden said that she was conscious of the pitfalls of playing the straight woman in a comedy like this, and while she liked the script and the character, she still came to her first meeting with Macaroni armed with some notes to make sure they were on the same page.

“It’s something that when I met with Sam I had a bunch of questions about,” Teegarden said. “I’m a bit studious when it comes to scripts and characters and layers, and I had a lot of questions about characters and a lot more ideas of how you can take something from feeling very one dimensional and something that is an archetype of a certain type of character and actually add in layers of a complete person.It was a lot of back-and-forth we went through with the script and with my character of giving her layers and colors, and just not being the damsel in distress who’s going to sit around and yell to somebody else to save her.”

You can see Guest House on streaming video on demand platforms now. The film is hitting DVD and Blu-ray in November.