Along with her female co-stars, Schumer speaks about how making The Humans – and having a baby – helped her reassess her life. And, perhaps, a previous review written by her interviewer …
‘Talking about The Humans always becomes like a therapy session,” Beanie Feldstein says, a few minutes into a group chat about the oppressive and unsettling adaptation of Stephen Karam’s Pulitzer-nominated play about a family gathering at Thanksgiving. Karam’s haunting and quite brilliant directorial debut reimagines a quirky dysfunctional-family drama as an eerie, anxious horror movie set in the New York equivalent of a haunted house: a crumbling downtown apartment. It’s a place that forces his characters to confront the brutal realities of who they are, who they’re not and who they’re stuck with. It also forces us to do the same.
Amy Schumer and Feldstein play sisters, and Jayne Houdyshell, who won a Tony for playing the role on stage, their mother. Richard Jenkins, Steven Yeun and June Squibb round out the cast. “It evokes so much emotion,” Schumer says of the film. “And it made me feel better about my own family, our trauma and struggles. If you can just keep your family speaking to each other, that’s a win. And sometimes it’s not doable.” Feldstein refers to it as a drama that “gets in your guts”, while Houdyshell agrees that “it makes you feel raw”.
