Jason Sudeikis at last year’s Sundance Film Festival (Getty Images)

Jason Sudeikis has been everywhere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The former Saturday Night Live comedian stars in a sketch that runs before every film at the festival, including his wife Olivia Wilde’s movie Meadowland and two of his own movies: Leslye Headland’s rom-com Sleeping With Other People and Tumbledown, a charming romantic dramedy that made its world debut on Saturday.

The movie stars Rebecca Hall as Hannah, the widow of a recently deceased folk musician named Hunter Miles, a Jeff Buckley-type who fell off a mountain near their rural Maine home. Sudeikis, 39, plays Andrew McDonnell, a New York City professor who is obsessed with the late singer’s music and demise and travels up to Maine to coax Hannah into an interview for a book he’s writing. Hannah is still grieving and assumes Andrew is a city slicker looking to exploit her late husband. Soon enough though, they grudgingly begin working together.

The film is mostly sweet and satisfying, but also tackles the appropriation and interpretation of artists’ work by critics who might not really know the intent behind it. Andrew makes a lot of assumptions about Miles — primarily that he committed suicide — but that may just be him projecting his own issues on a target who can’t respond. It makes for a nuanced performance from Sudeikis, who generally plays the part of the funny man. Of course, he’ll be returning to comedy in the upcoming reboot of the beloved ‘80s film series Fletch, taking on a role of an investigative reporter that was made famous by Chevy Chase.

Sudeikis spoke with Yahoo Movies about Tumbledown, life after SNL and his hopes for Fletch earlier this week.

Tumbledown seems to be pushing back against critics’ assumptions and putting words in an artist’s mouth.

But it also speaks toward the erudite, arrogant nature that the character hides behind. He’s not really who he is, and we discover that as the film goes. Certainly it speaks to the assumptions that Hannah makes of him and the assumptions people in the small town make of the city of tall buildings, and the assumptions we make of anyone who chooses to not live here.



You were on SNL for 10 years, and now there is instant reaction to sketches and episodes online. Did that get frustrating when people would misinterpret something?

I never spent too much time with it, because in comedy, you get that all the time. It’s one of the bigger differences with the experience of performing comedy-specific material: You know when something is working or not working. The conventional wisdom is that SNL has been bad since the second episode, so it’s just as much the fabric of it as anything.

You’ve had some big movies since SNL like Horrible Bosses and We’re the Millers. Do you have a larger game plan for your career?

I have no [plan] one way or another.… When I was doing Second City in Las Vegas, someone said, “Would you ever audition for SNL?” And I said “No way.” And I know now, as a grown man, that was like if someone had asked me, “Would you ever want to date Olivia Wilde?” I’d say no, but what I’d really be saying is that there’s no way in hell that she’d want to date me. I don’t want to act like I do, so when it doesn’t happen, I’m not hurt twice. So when you’ve only had your heroes and none of your peers at that point on SNL, you say, “No, I don’t want to work on that show [because] they don’t want me.”



You’re going to do a Fletch reboot soon. You were at the SNL 40th reunion with Chevy Chase — did you speak with him about it at all?

Not about Fletch. We’ve spoken about other things — it’s always good to see him. He’s one of those fellas that raised me like an uncle. And I have great uncles, but he and Tom Hanks and Michael Keaton and numerous other people were guys who made my dad laugh. You always hear that Chris Farley did what he did because John Belushi made his dad laugh, and I think that’s a very common experience.

But to play that part — it is as daunting and potentially rewarding as being a stage actor and hearing, “So they want you to play Hamlet,” or to play Willy Loman. We’re dipping back into the source material of the books. [The Fletch movies were inspired by the Gregory Mcdonald mystery novel series.] To simplify it, it would probably match up more in line with the original Beverly Hills Cop than necessarily the original Fletch — which I love and was raised by and I wanted to be him when I grew up.