A Conversation with Jay Duplass, Michael Strassner & Liz Larsen (THE BALTIMORONS)

The Baltimorons marks Jay Duplass’s return to feature directing after more than a decade away from the director’s chair. The film follows Cliff (Michael Strassner), a newly sober improv comedian who cracks a tooth on Christmas Eve and lands in the emergency care of Didi (Liz Larsen), an older no-nonsense dentist. What begins as a routine check-up sparks an unpredictable evening of misadventures as the unlikely pair discover their connection.

Duplass, one half of the acclaimed Duplass Brothers filmmaking duo, has spent recent years producing Emmy-winning series like Wild Wild Country and Somebody Somewhere while acting in projects like Transparent and Industry. For this intimate Baltimore-set romance, he collaborated with newcomer Michael Strassner, who co-wrote the script and delivers a breakout performance as Cliff. Veteran stage and screen actress Liz Larsen, Tony-nominated for The Most Happy Fella and recently seen in Transparent: The Musical, brings fierce vulnerability to the role of Didi.

Shot quickly with a small budget, The Baltimorons captures lightning in a bottle, a deeply personal story about connection, sobriety, and second chances that feels both lived-in and magical.

Hammer to Nail: Jay and Michael, this film came together very fast from script to shooting in just a month after the strike ended. Can you walk us through how this partnership began? And Liz, how did you get involved and what drew you to jump into this project?

Jay Duplass: It began with me thinking Michael Strassner is a wonder of the world. I like to say that he’s the most sensitive, sweet-hearted, gentle, woodland creature inside the body of a 1978 Chicago Bears linebacker. It’s kind of a winning combination. And then you get Liz Larsen, who’s a pint-sized dynamo. I saw her on stage for the Transparent Musical. She didn’t need a microphone. She could just belt to the back of the room. She just blew my brain off and I went up to her afterwards and said, “Hi, I’m gonna work with you.” And she was like, “Okay.” I bet she thought it wasn’t gonna happen, but she was seared in my mind.

Liz Larsen: In my heart, I knew it wasn’t gonna happen. I was like, “This is Jay Duplass. There’s no way I’m ever gonna see him again.” And then Jay calls me eight months later and texts me, “You wanna have lunch? I’m gonna be in New York City for three days.” This was November 2nd, The strike hadn’t ended yet. So we had lunch together and we talked for like two hours about everything, not the business at all. My father had just passed and we talked about that. Jay and my father share the same birthday. We talked about our lives and what we were dealing with after the pandemic. As we left, Jay said, “So you want to make a movie?” And I was like, “OK.” I went home and I said to my husband, “Honey, I will never hear from this guy again.” And then three weeks later I was on set.

Michael Strassner: He kind of has this way of just asking us very nonchalantly. And for us, it’s like, “That’s a big question, man… And it’s pretty awesome”

JD: It was a very old school way for me of making movies, which is just knowing people, knowing talented people who are not as expressed as they should be. I think we all three felt very trapped by the pandemic and trapped by our life circumstances. We all went through a lot of stuff during that time, trapped by the strikes. For me in particular, fearful of the end of independent filmmaking, because if we had done a COVID protocol on this movie, it would have cost more than the whole movie itself. I hadn’t made an original movie in 14 years. I had been trying to figure out how my brother and I were going to work together and whether he even wanted to direct movies and me figuring out that I definitely want to do that.

Jay Duplass – Photo by Sam Jones

I turned 50 during the pandemic and I was losing my mind. I was like, “I need to do this. And I need to make a movie that can’t be stopped.” Both Michael and Liz felt like talents that can’t be stopped. I mean, I know we made a movie with no movie stars, but they are movie stars. It’s just a matter of time. So it just felt like the universe was conspiring to help us make a piece of art. And even when everyone was kind of saying that movies, independent films, are like off-Broadway now. It’s been an amazing trip, just because we all put everything we had into it and told some deeply true stories and had fun doing it. And we’ve had this magical thing happen, which is we made a movie with no stars that made its money back on the sale and is going to get a significant theatrical release which is pretty much unheard of right now. Just to have people walk out of the movie theater and say things like, “This is the movie that I actually want to go to the movie theater on Saturday night with my person and watch this thing.” That’s been the reward in itself. It feels like a big-ass miracle that we’re sitting here talking to you about this tiny little thing that we did in freezing cold Baltimore during Christmas, almost a couple of years ago now.

MS: Yeah. Jay, even like a day before we got to SXSW, I was in the car with him and he was like, “We’ll probably lose money on this thing, doesn’t matter.” And it’s just like surprising everybody that the run that we’ve been on is beyond what we could have ever imagined. It’s just so cool.

HTN: Obviously, this was shot quickly with a small budget, but how did those constraints actually help the creative process? What happy accidents came from those limitations?

LL: 34th Street, the crab boat.

MS: The improv show. We had an auto shop and Jay was like, “I think that’s where we have the improv show.” We kind of used the locations that we had and made them interesting.

JD: It was entirely an available materials film. One of Michael’s best friends is our location manager/producer David Bonnett, who really wanted to step up his producing. His dad owned a lot of tow lots in the city and a couple of properties. We literally made a list of what are the locations that we have access to that we can get for free, and we designed the movie around them. The one location that we were gonna pay for, which was an improv space, we ended up rewriting that scene and needing something different. David’s family owned an auto body shop and we were like, “All right, we’re gonna make it a pop-up show in an auto body shop.” We went in there and there was this gorgeous Cadillac hovering above. So much kismet with this movie. This movie wanted to be made. Sometimes you make a movie and the forces of nature are fighting you every step of the way. Everyone wanted this movie to happen. All of our crew, all 15 of us. It just felt like it couldn’t be stopped. Even getting to shoot the Key Bridge two months before it came down. It’s just wild, the stuff that worked in our favor.

HTN: In reading some reviews for the movie, I’ve seen some people comparing it to Harold and Maude for its May-December dynamic. Did you guys study that film or other unlikely romance movies as reference?

JD: I’ve been consuming movies relentlessly my whole life, so it’s all in there. I knew that I wanted them to be mismatched in certain ways, but deeply matched in other ways. I knew that I wanted them to be super opposite and exactly what the other one needed. I do love Harold and Maude. It’s so romantic. We have not had too much mention of the May-December Part of it because Liz looks so fantastic and is so sexy in the movie and their chemistry is so palpable that you forget that there is this age gap. It’s more of a love story.

MS: It’s like Planes, Trains and Automobiles as a love story. That’s my comparison.

HTN: I love the sequence at the dentist’s office where Michael with the bloody cloth in his mouth points to the photo and says, “Am I messing up your Christmas?” followed by the hilarious ramblings while you’re on the laughing gas, and then the colder moment where Liz finds out she’ll potentially be alone on Christmas Eve. Can you talk about when in the writing process this came to you and what was important to all of you on the set?

Liz Larson in THE BALTIMORONS

MS: I think I pitched, “What if he has this giant mouth thing in his mouth?” And Jay was like, “That would be the craziest thing I think I’ve ever written.”

JD: To do that really tender, emotional moment for Liz with that monster in the background with that dental dam in his mouth. That is crazy. I always had this idea of an emergency dentist appointment that lasted a long, long time that kicked off this unexpected romance. I have all these weird nuggets for stories that have been floating around my head for decades. I always knew that having Michael’s character be terrified of needles was one of the ways that I could show right off the top that this was a very sweet, sensitive, gentle person, even though he looked like what Didi says: “Come on, you’re a big, strong guy.” I also thought it was a fun way to show how badass and large and in charge Didi was with her craft. She’s just a badass who’s just getting it done. She wants to get this guy in, get this guy out. But why is she here on Christmas Eve? What’s her deal? She doesn’t need to come do this. She drives a Mercedes. She has her own dental practice. She wants to be needed. It was that perfect scene where you’re getting all the bits, or at least you’re dropping all the little nuggets that are gonna flower later.

HTN: At the 45-minute mark, we have this party sequence with Liz’s family and what starts off kind of hostile turns into a sweet moment that I saw as a real turning point for their relationship. Can you guys talk about crafting that moment?

LL: I think for Didi, it was Cliff really taking care of her and really stepping in there and being a man for her and it just made me feel loved. So that was the turning point because he shamed my ex-husband, who had shamed me so many times.

JD: And did it with aplomb and humor. That was so cool. All of his improv, him just rolling with the punches and seeing what’s next, seeing what’s around the corner, which had been annoying the shit out of her because she had decided, “I’m closed. Closed for business.” To see Cliff’s ways turn to her favor and to win the day. To really put her ex-husband in his place in a way that is indefensible. She sees him operating and she’s like, “Jesus Christ,” because look, we all know comedians are the smartest people in the world. They are the smartest people in the world. They all say they’re dumb and they’re liars. To see her watch him operate to her favor, to own Conway so deeply in a way that Conway will never even understand is sexy as fuck. I love how Liz turns that character on a dime. She goes from just watching everybody with a discerning eye to just like, “Let’s party.” It scares the shit out of him. He has to put the brakes on now.

HTN: This leads into the conversation about yes-anding, improv and how she wants to go to the improv show. At the 55-minute mark, we have this wonderful improv moment. You get called on unexpectedly, and people are begging for you to seemingly go back to this old, wild, drunk character you once were. You two then win the hearts of this audience, and this leads to that first kiss. Following that is this impassioned conversation about how Liz’s breath smelled like alcohol, and how much it meant to you that you were able to do that sober. Can you guys just talk about your thinking?

MS: I think the main thing was I kind of saved her at Conway’s house by showing up and being there for her. And then I have to go into my own heart of darkness and go back to that. Nobody wants to help except for one person who’s there, and she comes up not knowing anything about improv and we still have a pretty fun scene and we connect really personally on that level too. She saves the day for me. That’s where the thing turns on for me. It’s like, “I don’t want this to end.” I haven’t had a day like this in six months and to do it sober adds to the whole entire thing.

JD: That was the main scene that we reshot. That was the toughest one. We had a good scene, but it wasn’t a great scene. Originally Michael just went up on stage and kind of won the day. We realized that he needed to fail and it needed to look like curtains for him in his comedy career. As we set up in the beginning of the movie: no more drinking, no more comedy. One of the nuggets that came to me when Michael and I were getting to know each other was when Michael told me that when he got sober, he just didn’t think he would ever be funny again. That just felt so relatable. I think not just for people who get sober, it’s just like, “If I do this, if I turn this corner, whatever it is, is everything that I’ve worked for just going to fall apart?”

What’s so critical about that improv scene is that she is the only person who’s willing to risk falling on her face for him. But it’s also that the original Baltimorons sketch that he tries to kick off on stage has to completely change. It becomes something different and it becomes about the fact that Didi does not know anything about improv and that becomes endearing in its own right, and he’s able to shift and change. He’s able to go from a bomb to a huge hit. The fact that they’re experiencing romantic chemistry and they’re able to hide behind their onstage characters a little bit to kiss each other was a little bit of Bill Shakespeare there. It’s always good to use those plot fundamentals.

 – Jack Schenker (@YUNGOCUPOTIS) 

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