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Director Maureen Bharoocha on Rita Moreno’s Two Requests Before Signing on for Campy Horror The Prank, Watching the EGOT Winner Break Bad | Features


As a viewer, perhaps the biggest joy of the schoolyard-hijinks-gone-wrong film is that the 92-year-old actress seemed to be having so much fun being bad.

“And she’s never played anything like this,” Bharoocha continued. “I was thinking, maybe if we can get her the script, she’d be like,Oh, I want do something that I’ve never done before,’ and it could be enticing in that way.”

And the rest, they say, is history. The film premiered at SXSW in 2022, and Moreno’s turn in the campy, genre-bending story was met with applause.

For this year’s Women Writers Week, RogerEbert.com spoke with Bharoocha via Zoom about casting and directing the legendary actress in the “part comedy, part thrills” drama, the gamble of mixing genres, and the “zigzaggy” career path that has led her to SXSW and beyond.

Hannah Loesch: I think a good place to start would be the origin story forThe Prank.” How did you become attached to the story, and how did you get EGOT winner Rita Moreno to star?

It kind of happened in two different ways. I got this script written by Rebecca Flinn-White and Zak White and it just kind of leapt off the page for me. It was just so much fun and I hadn’t read anything like it. And so often as a director, when you read other people’s scripts, it’s like, do I connect with this? No. But something about their script was just so exciting. I immediately could visualize it and I kind of made it my own in my head. And so I was like, Oh, I really wanna direct this movie. And then I had always wanted to work with Rita Moreno. She’s a legend and an EGOT and just somebody who I’ve admired for so long… So I kind of kind of put my spin on it and we sent it to Rita.

Cailin Loesch: Tell us about Rita Moreno as a villain in this story. When I first read about “The Prank,” I just kept picturing her as this Cruella De Vil–type character who targets children instead of dogs. [All laugh] That could not be accurate. I assume she made the role her own.

One thing that I think we can all relate to is having tough-as-nails-type teachers who are really hard on you. I had Mrs. Jordan, my seventh-grade nemesis, who I thought was always a little harder on me than everybody else and picked on me. And when you’re young, you don’t realize that sometimes it’s because they see more in you, so they’re tougher on you. The character of Mrs. Wheeler, that’s how I approached her with Rita: She’s a tough teacher who loves teaching and kind of loves the idea of punishing her students to make them better. She takes a little satisfaction from that. That devilish glee from really being tough on your students was where we drew from.

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