Francis Ford Coppola looks to “SNL” for his casting choices, at least when it came to cast member Chloe Fineman.
The actress told Variety that she has a Melania Trump impression to thank for landing her role in Coppola’s “Megalopolis.”
“Sometimes people go to weird shows that you don’t expect,” Fineman said. “It was 2019. I was [performing a sketch of] Ivana Trump and Melania FaceTiming. And I guess Francis was there, and he offered it from my weird Melania thing.”
She added, “You just never know who’s there.”
Fineman is part of the ensemble cast for Coppola’s self-financed “Megalopolis” that debuted at Cannes. Aubrey Plaza, Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Shia LaBeouf, and more actors also star.
“I weirdly feel more at home in the acting stuff, because I’m really late in life to comedy,” Fineman admitted of appearing in the film. “I didn’t do my first comedy show until I was 27. I didn’t get ‘SNL’ until 30. So for me, it was back to what I love.”
While “Megalopolis” is still looking for distribution, the utopia-set epic was also not all serious on set. Plaza previously told Deadline that she would go to the “Megalopolis” set in her “Agatha All Along” costume to prank co-star Driver.
“At one point, when I was dressed in the Marvel character, I snuck onto the ‘Megalopolis’ set and I started harassing Giancarlo Esposito and Adam [Driver] and everyone,” Plaza said. “It was absolutely insane behavior.”
Probably much like “SNL,” the “Megalopolis” cast was encouraged to “play” with takes, according to Plaza.
“It’s an intense set when you know that Francis is behind the monitor and it’s your turn. Of course, there were moments that were just insane,” Plaza said. “I don’t want to speak for [Coppola], but it seems to me that he gathers a group of interesting, wild actors and then he tries to inspire them to play. We wrote scenes and we conducted ourselves like a theater troupe, me and Jon Voight and Shia [LaBeouf]. We were writing scenes and giving them to the script supervisor. And then she would give them to Francis and sometimes he would like it and put it in. But every day he wanted to play. He ran it like it was a theater camp. There were games all day, and we were in character the whole time.”
