In “Top Five,” Chris Rock plays a comedian named Andre Allen who has wide success acting in lowbrow action comedies. However, he wants his career to go in another direction. Andre is so desperate to be taken seriously and be seen in a more serious light that he has produced a drama about a Haitian slave revolt that is bound to fail. And he is letting a newspaper reporter follow him around to write a profile. Though the film is a comedy it has a raw edgy side as well and is something new and refreshing from Chris Rock. During a recent junket for the film Rock and other cast members were able to discuss the writing process, production and more.
"You know, it’s weird. I made this movie just like my stand-up. I used to have like a movie process and a stand-up process and I used to say ‘okay, these are the jokes for the movie’ and then I’d have a whole ‘nother file for stand-up. Not this one! It’s like I put it all together, you know, I workshopped it a long time like I do my stand-up," said Rock in regards to writing "Top Five." He continued, "I treated it just like my stand-up, and that was kinda the goal: to get a movie that felt like my stand-up. That kinda went all over the place; start here and went there and can be about relationships and have a political component to it."
Sherri Shepherd recalls her scene with Chris and commented on the personal relationship the actors had when the cameras were off and how it helped portray something more once they started filming.
"What happened before that scene in those days that we were filming was, it was a chemistry that had become with all of these comics and we would sit there, and Chris as well, and we were just silly. Every single day," said Shepherd. "Just silly, just talking and then it just it bred this thing so that it was a natural kind of you know, it was just a natural kind of process once those cameras started rolling, I felt it was, Rosario, everybody was so silly, I mean it was roaches everywhere. I mean, number one, we bonded over that. It was."
Aside from personal connections translating to onscreen relationships the actors also spoke of the creative freedom they had while filming "Top Five." Rosario Dawson and Gabrielle Union talked of a scene together that started off on script and just kept going to something else.
"You [Rosario Dawson] did what was on the script, then you kept going, and you kept going. You’re like is he going to say cut at any point? Is he going? And you kept and he let you go and go and go and that’s where you found that magic," said Union.
"Especially that one scene where you see me when you first, when you walk in," said Dawson. "And I remember we were working on it, and I go ‘did you see that look she gave me’? and he goes ‘what, I didn’t even’ and I’m like ‘look, that’s the look, that’s a good look. You can’t cut that out of the scene. That’s important. We feel that look’."
Other actors and comedians to show up in “Top Five” include Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan, Romany Malco, Leslie Jones, Anders Holm, Michael Che and Jay Pharoah. Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, and Whoopi Goldberg appear, too.
“Top Five” opens in theaters on Dec. 12.
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