From SNL to Sibling Hell: Craig Johnson on The Skeleton Twins
During their stints on SNL, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig proved themselves expert comic performers. In The Skeleton Twins they reveal substantial dramatic chops too. The film's writer-director, Craig Johnson, discusses channeling their dark sides
Familial relationships have proved a rich source of inspiration for filmmakers over the years; Oedipal tensions, Electra complexes and sibling rivalries are cinema staples. Movies dealing with a brother-sister dynamic, however, are about as common as a Béla Tarr rom-com. This is just one of the reasons to cherish Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins (another is that it’s very good), which sees a pair of maladjusted siblings, Milo and Maggie (played by SNL pals Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig), thrown back together after a decade estranged.
We put this question to Johnson when he was in Edinburgh for The Skeleton Twins’ UK premiere at the city’s film festival: why has the brother-sister bond been so rarely explored on film? “I think people take it for granted,” he suggests. “It doesn’t feel like a flashy premise for a movie.” It is, however, a universal one. “I still experience it when I go back for the holidays” – he has a sister two years his junior – “if you’re with your sibling you just revert to that childlike relationship and find yourself getting bitchier and whinier and less mature. And then you catch yourself and you go, ‘Wait, I’m 38 years old, why am I acting like a 12-year-old?’”
The reason for the twins’ reunion is not a happy one: the film opens with Milo, a gay wannabe actor, slitting his wrists in the bathtub. Maggie, a dental hygienist bored with her conventional life, persuades her brother to move back with her to the upstate New York town where they grew up ’til he finds his feet. The pair do regress to childhood behaviours, but there are benefits too. “I feel like often one can be oneself around your sibling,” points our Johnson, “like your truly goofy self. You just strip away all the masks you wear in everyday life.”
“All movies need big blasts of entertainment, no matter what kind of movie it is” – Craig Johnson
The masks this pair wear are many. When Milo returns he surreptitiously rekindles a sexual relationship he had with a teacher while at high school. Maggie has secrets of her own: chiefly she habitually cheats on her square husband (charmingly played by Luke Wilson). So as well as suicide and depression, that’s infidelity and child abuse in the mix. The joy of Johnson’s film, though, is that these heavy themes are worn lightly. If you were to be waiting in the wings of the theatre in which The Skeleton Twins is playing, listening to the audience reaction, you’d never have guessed it wasn’t a straight-up comedy, given its abundance of LOLs.
“I love set pieces in movies – I love me a good car chase,” reveals Johnson. “All movies need big blasts of entertainment, no matter what kind of movie it is.” The Skeleton Twins is full of these ebullient moments: a visit to Maggie’s dental surgery plays like an inspired improv session; a section set during Halloween showcases the film's lyrical, autumnal beauty; and, best of all, there's a scene where Milo drags Maggie out of a funk by lip-syncing to Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now that swells into a dance routine worthy of Astaire and Rogers. Crucially, Johnson explains, these moments are more than just nuggets of revelry. “I think people want movie moments to remember, but they can’t just exist outside the story: they have to be implemented, integrated, in a way that’s all part of it.”
This kind of nuanced, character-driven storytelling is relatively new to Wiig and Hader, who’ve spent most of their careers playing outrageous comic creations on SNL or in Judd Apatow comedies. They’re more than up to the task, however, equally credible in dramatic moments as in funny ones. They’re part of a long lineage of comedians – Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, the late Robin Williams, to name a few – who’ve proved impressive in dramatic roles. “Comedic actors tend to be really smart,” suggests Johnson, when we bring up this tradition of comic actors channelling their darker sides. “And when you’re intelligent you’re a good observer of all aspects of life, the funny, the dark, all of it. And often you find humour in laughing in the face of darkness, which is really what this movie is about.”
Even acknowledging this tradition of comics seamlessly moving into drama, audiences are still likely to be bowled over by these two performances, Hader's in particular, who up until this point hadn’t played the lead in a comic vehicle, never mind one as emotionally wrought as The Skeleton Twins. Johnson, unsurprisingly, is full of praise: “Bill was a revelation to me. He’s like Peter Sellers, or maybe even someone like Gary Oldman. He could go off and play a James Bond villain, or play a scary cockney hitman if he had to. And he could play a nice guy who lives next door. He is that kind of actor.”