'Behaving Badly' Clip: Mary-Louise Parker Is Nat Wolff's Holy Vision
In writer-director Tim Garrick’s twisted little dark comedy Behaving Badly, Nat Wolff (The Fault In Our Stars) plays high-schooler Rick Stevens, one seriously under-supervised teenager. The adults in his life — including his mother (played by Mary-Louise Parker), his father (Cary Elwes), and best friend’s oversexed mom (Elizabeth Shue) — all seem to be competing to see who can break more laws of common decency, leaving Rick woefully misguided. One thing he does know, though, is that he’s in love with Nina Pennington (Selena Gomez), and will stop at nothing to get her — even if it means doing a lot of sinning along the way. In a phone call last week, Garrick described the film — which is based on Ric Browde’s cult novel While I’m Dead, Feed the Dog — as being a bit like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on crack.”
You can get a taste for that madness in our exclusive clip above, in which Rick gets some much-needed advice from Lola (also played by Parker), a no-nonsense woman who not only looks exactly like his mother, but also claims to be Saint Lola, “the patron saint of teenagers.” “Rick’s just made a bet with a mobster’s son that he can go out on a date with Nina, and of course, he has no chance in hell of doing that,” says Garrick. “He goes into the bathroom at his high school, and she appears out of nowhere. She’s more or less a figment of his imagination, and [though] she tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, she’s not totally successful.”
As you can tell by the outfit, the part of Saint Lola called for quite a bit of boundary-pushing, not that Parker wasn’t ready for it. “Whatever I threw at her, she was like ‘Let’s go,’ which was amazing” says Garrick. “As Saint Lola, she wanted to be as sexy and as stunning and as out-there as possible. She was a very game.”
Behaving Badly opens in limited release on August 1.
