'It was just like fire': Jennifer Coolidge reflects on her chemistry with A Minecraft Movie's love interest, Nitwit the villager
My favourite part of A Minecraft Movie, without a shadow of a doubt, has to be Jennifer Coolidge's romance with Nitwit, a villager who escapes the Overworld and gets hit by her car. It's a love story for the ages, and an onscreen romance that Coolidge has herself admitted had some fire to it.
"Sometimes you show up to a movie and you read the script and they haven't cast your lover yet and then you show up and you're like 'I don't know if I really want to make out with him'," Jennifer Coolidge says in an interview with BBC Radio 1. "But when I saw what Nitwit looked like and what Bret McKenzie looked like and the combination of the two. I mean, it was just like fire."
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While Steve and the rest of the crew are trying to save the Overworld, Jennifer Coolidge, who plays vice principal Marlene, stumbles across Nitwit, a Minecraft villager who strayed through the Overworld portal and straight into a road, and then into the bonnet of Marlene's car.
After trying to convince him not to sue her because "people just love to sue me when I hit them with my Jeep Grand Cherokee," Marlene settles things by offering to take Nitwit out to dinner as a way to say sorry and avoid court. What precedes is a surprisingly wholesome love story as Marlene and Nitwit get to know each other better.
While the chemistry is clearly undeniable, we can't give all the credit to Nitwit—some of it has to go to his on-set performer, Bret McKenzie. Nitwit's head was CGI, and McKenzie wore a block costume while on set. "He was inside a box, I don't know what he was doing in there," Coolidge says.
"It was a lot because Bret is—this is not very nice to say—more attractive than Nitwit," Coolidge tells Digital Spy. "Bret McKenzie's a genius, it's hard to do a performance through a cardboard box and still have you laughing, but he was able to do it," Coolidge told Digital Spy.
There were a few scenes in A Minecraft Movie which genuinely made me laugh, but Coolidge's scenes with Nitwit were the most consistently funny in the whole film. They were scattered in sparingly, but were a real highlight, so much so that I was left wanting more, especially after the outlandish mid-credit scene.