The GQ+A: Life Partners’ Adam Brody On How To Win Over Your Girlfriend’s Friends

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Adam Brody is a third wheel—sort of. At least in Life Partners, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, where in the Most Realistic Scene In Movie History, Brody gets stuck watching America’s Next Top Model while drinking wine with his girlfriend and her bestie. In this refreshingly honest twist on the eyeroll-inducing rom-com genre, Brody plays Tim, new boyfriend-turned-fiancé to Paige (Gillian Jacobs). Their relationship throws a wrench into the friendship between Paige and her lesbian BFF Sasha (played by Brody’s real-life life partner, Leighton Meester) and passive aggressive hilarity ensues. We rang up Brody to talk about the movie, relationship advice, and his new Whit Stillman project The Cosmopolitans.

GQ: What’s the trick to becoming the Life Partner that your girlfriend’s friends love too?

Adam Brody: I guess tread lightly—to be honest, I haven’t had so much of a confrontational situation like that in my life, and ideally you wouldn’t. Even in Life Partners, it’s not really Tim’s thing to do. You can be as sensitive as you can, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Ideally you’re not adversaries; it’s a collaboration of loving this person, that you both love and want the best for. Obviously, if she likes both of you, then you’ll probably like each other as well. You don’t want to, like, totally rip someone out of the clutches of their best friend. And at the same time, we all have a right to want the time we want and require.

What should you never, under any circumstances, do at a wedding?

As a guest at a wedding, what should you never do? Fuck if I know. Try not to humblebrag too much in your speech, I guess. Don’t get, I don’t know…get hammered, who cares?

Choose a superpower.

I would like to read super, super fast. Like, Good Will Hunting is how I would like to read.

A theme song played?

“Playing With the Boys.” The Kenny Loggins volleyball song.

If you were reincarnated as any musician in history’s instrument, what would it be?

This is, like, weirdly sexual. He’s gonna have his sweaty fingers all over me? I don’t know… I guess… let me think here. I don’t know. Beethoven’s whatever-you-call-it. Beethoven’s conductor’s wand. I’ll get in on the ground floor, where it all started.

Ever have the same dream more than once?

I think it’s an anxiety dream—for years and years, for my whole life, I’ll have a lot of surfing dreams, but I never actually surf in them. I can’t find my board, or I get out there and then the waves stop, or my board turns into a piece of spaghetti.

Your next project: the Whit Stillman-created series for Amazon, The Cosmopolitans. Favorite Stillman movie?

I go back and forth all the time. It’s pretty hard. I thought it was Barcelona for a long time, but then recently I went back and thought, No, it’s Last Days of Disco, actually. Then, I don’t know, Metropolitan has its charms. And then Damsels in Distress is amazing in its own right and has its own stuff. I guess I’ll just say Last Days of Disco, because I think that’s when he had, like, ten million dollars. It’s, like, as good as all of them, but then has a huge budget for that kind of movie as well, so the look is just a little bigger than all of them.

Best part about shooting in Paris so far?

** **The best thing is—or not the best, but a funny thing—they serve wine at lunch. On set. Which seems totally counter-productive, but apparently it’s not.