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Simon Rex and Dustin Milligan have a lot in common. Not only are they the co-stars of the new indie comedyOperation Taco Gary’s, which just premiered at the Austin Film Festival, but they also came up in teen dramas in the 2000s before a recent resurgence.
Rex has had a second wind in his career since hiscritically acclaimed role in Sean Baker’sRed Rocket, while Milligan had a supporting role in theupcoming Netflix romantic comedyHot Frosty.
Now, Rex and Milligan have their eyes set on the comedy world. For Rex, it’s a return to form since hisScary Moviedays. For Milligan, it’s an exciting new chapter in a bustling career. But one thing is for sure — if the comedies they make are downright charming and riotous asOperation Taco Gary’s, we can’t wait to see more.
Before the film’s festival premiere, we got to sit down with Rex and Milligan to talk everythingOperation Taco Gary’sand the thrilling inflection point in their careers at which this project is coming.
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Simon Rex and Dustin Milligan TalkOperation Taco Gary’s
FandomWire: So, first of all, how did you become attached toOperation Taco Gary’s?
Simon Rex:I’m friends with the producer, Matt Vaughan, and he and I have done a couple of things over the years, and he approached me and said, Hey, man, I got this script. I’d love to do it. And my first instinct was, “Yeah, okay, dude,” and actually, I was incorrect. I love it when I’m wrong. I had an aversion to working with friends; it had been problematic for me in the past, and he had never done a big feature film before.
Then I read the script, and I was blown away because I was laughing out loud on every page. My agents and my managers and I were all like, “Oh, we’ve got to do this. If we can execute what’s on the page, this could be really funny.”
And Michael Kvamme, he started Funny or Die. He’s worked with Will Ferrell, he’s worked with Adam McKay. Really smart, really funny dude. And we said, “F**k it, let’s go for it.”
There are no comedies being made in Hollywood that much anymore. So I wanted to do comedy again because I haven’t gotten to do comedy in a very long time, so I was very excited to do it, and I’m just glad that I feel we executed it.
DustinMilligan:Mine’s the usual channels. My reps brought me the script, and they’re like, “What do you think? The producer and director would want to meet with you and then potentially have you audition.” I read this script and was emphatically like, “This is the exact kind of movie I have always wanted to be in and be a part of.” And it really was something where I was just like, whatever I’ve got to do.
I met through Zoom at that time with Matt and Mikey, and there’s just a bit of a “click,” you know? We kind of understood each other, understood what Mikey was going for in the comedy.
And similar to Simon, anytime you’re laughing out loud in a script, it’s so rare because we are always looking at these things with such a critical eye, and you have to kind of protect yourself. And unfortunately, there’s this pattern where we’re always looking for a reason to say no. But this script was just a yes train. It was just like all aboard the whole time.
So I went in, and I read with Simon for a chemistry read, and it went well enough that I got to hop on board and just continue that yes train all the way to Laughsville, USA!
Rex:Yeah. He came in and read with a bunch of other actors, and we all looked at each other after he left the room, and we’re like, “He’s the guy.”
And we made a special movie. I’m really happy with it. We’re looking forward to hearing a crowd response. I’ve only watched the movie a couple times at home on a computer or at home on a TV. So, it’s always exciting to share it with people, especially in Texas.
I had a movie here a couple of years ago at South by Southwest that I’d watched in a screening room with my agents and managers, and we watched the movie, and we’re like, “Okay, yeah, it’s good. It’s good.” And then we came and saw it here with an audience, and we’re like, “Wow, it’s great!” because you got to hear people responding that weren’t just in the industry.
It was a whole different experience sharing it with them, like this is the real audience that should watch this movie. We’re in Texas. They were howling at the screen and laughing when we didn’t even realize there were jokes in a good way. So yeah, we’re looking forward to sharing it.
Milligan:The energy when you actually can sit down with a real audience, which is rarer and rarer now, even for movies that are destined to be streamed, that opportunity to actually sit down and feel that energy, it is very much a contagious thing where one person starts laughing and it, it sort of allows everyone else to relax, and it frees everyone else to be like, “You know what? I can take my guard down.”
Similar to what I was saying before about, you know, as actors or people in the industry, you’re always on the lookout for a reason to say no. Audiences are like that now, too. They can watch anything they want. They can do anything with their time, watch four different things at once on different screens. But when they all sit down together and start laughing together, it’s this kind of collective and, unfortunately, weird thing where everyone’s allowed to just sit there and be present and have a good time, especially for a bonkers movie like this.
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FW: In comedy, some of the most effective jokes are specific ones. From the perspective of an actor, why do you think this is?
Milligan:There’s this term broad comedy that always gets thrown around, which I think a lot of people just assume means base level, lowest common denominator jokes. But I think there’s a lot of very specific, broad comedy in this, and it comes down to the fact that, yeah, we want to be caught off guard by what we’re laughing at. And, like, it just again, like, further takes your guard down and allows you just to relax.
Rex:So I live out in Joshua Tree, and what we did was — which I’ve never done before, especially with comedy — is we rehearsed this because I have very long rants in this movie, and speed is your friend, so you really want to plow through to make it funnier. We really kind of turned it up.
So we went out two months before we shot to my house, and [Dustin] and I even talked like, “I hope we’re not shooting ourselves in the foot by over-rehearsing.” Because with comedy, I think the more you rehearse, the less funny it is to you, and therefore, it’ll be less funny to the audience. But in this case, it required it — I think more so for me than you because I had these long, two-page rants that took all of my RAM and my brain.
So that was a first for me: to really over-rehearse comedy. I’ve learned that that usually doesn’t work, but I think in this case, it worked, and because speed is your friend, you want to plow through those jokes.
Also, we’re playing it serious. When the writing’s funny and the situation is funny, you don’t have to lean into the comedy. You just play it straight, and that’s what’s funny. So, it actually makes it easier than trying to be performative and funny. I mean, he’s truly just going crazy and frustrated the whole time. I’m simply just on this mission to — I don’t want to give anything away — get him from A to B, and you just play it straight. And that’s like Leslie Nielsen and Naked Gun. You know, he’s not being funny. It’s funny.
FW: Mr. Rex, you have a lot of absurd scenes and dialogue that you had to sell with sincerity. How did you balance this out there humor with emotional authenticity?
Rex:Well, actually, you know, it’s funny; the only time I thought that I had to drop in and be really totally sincere is at the end. I finally drop in and then play it sincere and kind of stop the insanity that I’ve been doing the whole movie. So, for the most part, it was mostly just keeping it on 10, plowing through the jokes. It’s kind of my default setting. I’m naturally pretty fast and ADHD, so that wasn’t that hard for me.
FW: And Mr. Milligan, in a more reactive role, you’re required to play it straight. How often did you break?
Milligan:Some of the situations — Tony [Cavalero]! And you rehearsed with Tony the night before, which I didn’t. But I saw the screener, and you can see me a couple of times almost breaking. The whole time, he was just so so funny.
And especially at that moment, my character has so many low points, and that’s sort of towards the midpoint of his lows, and he’s just so exhausted. He’s also somewhat drugged up. So, I had to be exceptionally non-reactive to what Tony was doing. And that guy is so funny. Every take was different. Every take was funnier and building and building, and I just didn’t see any of it coming.
Also, with Arturo and Jason, who were also so funny, they were improvising a bunch of their stuff. And again, one of the challenges for me, which took a surprising amount of energy, was to be non-reactive to the comedy of what was going on and remain in the state of being, like, freaked out and panicked about the reality of the situation. I couldn’t engage in it at all whatsoever. So there was a few times I really struggled to keep it together.
But again, a testament to, I think, the comedy and the casting of this movie in general, there are just so many people delivering that bit by bit of something unexpected that I was all over the place. Simon was a real pro, though.
Rex:And actually, I just love this topic too because I struggle with some of my friends in real life who are conspiracy theorists who drive me insane. So, this was a cathartic thing for me to do, to get to have fun with it, and basically drew an impression of a couple of my friends who are this guy that I played.
So it was kind of easy to just be like, “Oh, I’m just gonna be my buddy who is always sending me these insane conspiracy theorist videos and yelling at me on the phone about how I’m a sheep. And it was fun to get to play with it and make some light out of it.
And this is the first movie I ever produced, I’d like to add. I’ve never done this before. It was fun to have that hat on and help out with things. Like normally, as an actor, it’s “Stand here. Say this. Say it like this. Wear this. We don’t really care about your creative input outside of that.” So, for the first time, I had more input on what I was going to wear and helping cast Tony in the movie and rewriting jokes a bit. And so I want to do more of that.
Milligan:Yeah, that was actually one of the things too that was unique about this experience: that we got to come on in that role — you prior to me, and when we went out to Joshua — there was a lot of creative collaboration that I think as producers, you get to just sort of have more liberty with, and you feel a bit more comfortable offering that. Where sometimes, when you’re just the actor, there’s a bit of an attitude of, like, “Shut up and say your f***ing lines,” which is fine. I mean, that’s the job; that’s what you get paid for.
But there was something really nice about this, where, throughout the entire process, having these conversations with Mikey while we were going through it, and just being like, “Well, actually, maybe if we pivot here, both in tone or actually with dialogue, or what if we cut this whole half page.” It felt like a very rare creative collaboration that I’m hoping more of in the future, similarly because it just allows you to come on board and dig in in a way that is more meaningful than usual.”
FW: In absurdism, there’s a delicate balance to strike. You’re trying to go as far and silly as possible without becoming totally unbelievable. As actors, how did you commit to this wacky world ofOperation Taco Gary’s?
Milligan:Again, it’s like you’re brought in like in a partnership in a way that you don’t always get that opportunity. Though, that I will say — tonally and pacing-wise — was already there on the page. It was such a strong script. And for us as actors, we got to kind of dial in and be like, “Okay, so what can I do to maintain the energy and pace of this scene so it doesn’t, as you say, fall flat?”
Because that would be the killer of a movie like this — if, at the inappropriate time, we lose steam, because we’re gonna lose the audience if we have too many of these rants. But Simon was so beautifully able to pace them out so well, not just fast but also articulate and hitting these beats the right way.
Again, there was just this energy right from the beginning and the rehearsals. We just got to really sit in it and sit with it and be like, “Alright. We’re going to make sure that we can tweak it here and tweak it there. We know our lines well enough that we can just make these tiny adjustments and deliver something that the pacing keeps going and feels like it’s moving without ever losing those emotional stakes.”
Rex:To me, this is kind of a throwback to the ‘90s and early 2000s comedies that, again, aren’t being made. And I love that it’s 90 minutes, more or less. So many great movies from that era were always 15 minutes too long. I’m very happy. I feel like it never lets up, and it ends. You’re on board the whole time, and it’s 90 minutes. And to me, that’s the perfect length for a comedy. It’s 90 minutes, especially in this day and age with TikTok and Instagram and people’s attention span. Now, 90 minutes seems like an eternity, but I grew up with 90 minutes of sort of the formula for a perfect-length comedy.
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FW: Yet, as ridiculous and funny as the film is, it’s grounded in a deep emotional core. What did you find resonant about your characters?
Rex:I guess it’s really just about us being brothers, and I don’t want to give too much away, but my intentions are good, and it’s funny because that’s what’s the situation with my conspiracy theorist friends, that I’ve had to accept is. They’re actually coming from a good place. They think that they’re doing good and, you know, maybe they’re right. I don’t know. I don’t really agree with that, but that’s okay.
But I think that my character, as insane as he is and obnoxious as he is, he’s trying to do the right thing, and then that pays off in the end, and he’s sort of a hero, in a sense. So yeah, again, you just play it straight. If the writing is good like this, it makes your job a lot easier.
Milligan:Exactly that. I think we both understood kind of intrinsically, just because of what was on the page already, like that foundation of brotherhood, which was strained. There’s a bit of history that is sort of discovered as we go through the story. But it really is about that. It’s just about two people who have love there, but there’s also a very complicated, difficult history that is completely relatable.
I think everybody in one relationship or dynamic or another in their life can relate to that. It’s a tale as old as time. There are people who are family or are just our loved ones that you don’t always see eye to eye on. This is obviously a kind of extreme version of it for comedic effect, but it’s a very simple thing that I felt like we just kind of dropped into that aspect of it right away. That wasn’t actually something that we talked a ton about.
Rex:It’s just chemistry. Going back to him coming in and reading, I’ve been in plenty of chemistry reads where it’s like if you’re the guy, you’re the guy. It doesn’t matter how good of a read you do, if you’re of the essence of the character. We just had a rapport that felt like, “Oh, these guys are brothers.” So I think we just happen to have that chemistry, and it just works.
FW: The two of you play a sort of “odd couple” dynamic here. Were there any inspirations for your dynamic, or do you have any favorite “odd couples” in movie history?
Rex:There are so many, but I was actually talking to a friend last night, and she was telling me her sister is so opposite of her. Her sister’s very masculine. She’s like a jock, the girl I’m friends with, very feminine. And I’ve noticed so many siblings are opposite. That’s quite normal. So I think that, back to what we’re talking about, it’s pretty normal to have two brothers be totally different.
Milligan:And to tie that into what you were asking, I was not so much thinking of on-screen odd couples because I feel like that dynamic is just so ingrained through osmosis. I think because of cinema history, we all just sort of understand that dynamic really well.
But it was actually a couple of people that I grew up with where that’s their dynamic with their siblings because they just are so separate in their lives. But again, the interesting thing is if you ever go over to their house, there are all those photos of them together as kids, and like, there are all these memories that will come up in conversation that reference this sibling that is just so opposite from this person that it’s hard to imagine how they are related. But that, of course, is such a fertile ground for comedy.
Rex:AndMidnight Runis the one that I think is my favorite odd couple.
Milligan:We watched that!
Rex:It’s one of my favorite movies. And to me, Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro’s chemistry was the perfect road — and not buddy, because they’re not buddies, he was basically kidnapped… it’s actually very similar…
Milligan:I hadn’t seen that. We watched it in Joshua Tree on the last night of our rehearsal weekend, and it was so good.
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FW: And on that topic, the buddy comedy genre is one that has stood the test of time. Why do you think people still love buddy comedies to this day?
Rex:I hope they do. That’s the thing. We want to keep them alive. Hollywood’s cranking out all these horror movies. Those seem to do well. Comedies are in a weird place. I talked to some people in the industry, and there are a lot of things to attribute to why that is. Stand-up comedy is bigger than ever. Podcasts are huge. You could go on your phone and get laughs all day and bite-sized clips.
But to me, it’s important to keep these alive, and that’s really why I wanted to do this so much: because we need to keep them going. And this feels like it could be from any era. It doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s a 2024 movie.
FW: And in terms of your career, it’s kind of like a full-circle thing. You started mostly in comedy, and then you kind of came back to comedy recently. How does it feel to be part of these waves in the genre?
Rex:I mean, I feel like that’s my default setting in real life. I always go to a joke. Whether or not that’s healthy or not, I can’t say, but I feel like my default setting is comedic. So that’s why I wanted to kind of use that muscle again because I hadn’t done it in so long. It’s been, like, 20 years since I didScary Movieand sitcoms when those were a thing.
In the early 2000s, I was doing like spoof movies and sitcoms on The WB; it was all comedy. And now I sort of have this new chapter in my life where I’m doing all these dramatic roles, which is awesome, but I want to do this more. I mean, Jamie Foxx is hosting a reality show. There are no rules anymore. You could do anything. So I really wanted to do this.
FW: And then on your career, Mr. Milligan, you had that kind of moment in comedy as well, withSchitt’s Creek. How is it different for you to make these feature comedies versus TV comedies?
Milligan:When I first started, I actually had to push pretty hard to get into the comedy space. And I was very lucky that simultaneously, while I was sort of on what The WB became, The CW — the very first year The CW became the CW — I was on a show, then another CW show, which was leaning more into the soap drama genre. I’ve done a lot of that kind of stuff, but I always had to keep pushing to squeeze into the comedy space.
And I’ve been very lucky that it has worked and it has lasted. I’ve worked with a lot of greats in the feature space, actually, in comedies, but this one in particular. Going back to what Simon was saying, this just struck me in that way, where it feels like that timeless classic kind of 90s buddy dynamic comedy, which I haven’t had a chance to play yet.
I play a lot of dickheads, dorks, or nice or sweet guys, or whatever. But in this one, I got to kind of cycle through all three at once, ramping up into this finale that we have at the end of it. It’s been something where it’s like, I’m very lucky to get to bounce around in a lot of different genres.
And similar to Simon, my instincts are always comedic. So that’s just the muscle that it never really goes away. But you do want to keep working it. And also, in this climate, you just want to keep working.
Rex:Yeah, and I don’t think you can learn comedy. He’s just naturally funny. Like, in real life, he’s just a funny dude. And I don’t think that’s something you can learn. I think you either have that or you don’t. I remember going in New York to these improv classes, and there were these people in there, trying to be funny, and the teacher wasn’t funny, and I’m sitting there going, “These people aren’t funny, and I don’t think it’s a learned thing,”
And maybe it is learned in your childhood, and you’re formed, but I don’t think you could just say, “I want to go learn.” Like, I had a buddy of mine who was trying to do stand-up, and he just wasn’t funny, and it was really hard to watch and go support him. And I don’t think it’s a learned thing.
I grew up as an only child watching Mel Brooks and David Zucker movies and sitcoms that just kind of molded me, that old-school comedy. To me, this movie is just a byproduct of all the stuff I grew up on.
FW: So this is obviously an independent film that doesn’t have distribution yet. What do you want people to know aboutOperation Taco Gary’s?
Milligan:This is the kind of movie that will surprise you. It’ll be wonderful in a nostalgic sense. It’ll kind of bring you back, I think, to a feeling that you got when you were watching comedies for a wide age range. But it’s also very contemporary, considering the kind of conspiracy theory thing that’s, let’s face it, proliferating, certainly in the United States right now.
Then it’s got that heart as well. And I hate to say it because I know everyone’s just like, “Oh, it’s got heart!” But this one really does. And it’s not just something that’s slapped on conveniently. It’s running through the whole thing, and that’s what’s driving these laughs.
And also, if you have a distribution company or a ton of money, please help us out.
Rex:Yeah, exactly what he said. And I think now more than ever, we need to put our brains under our seats for 90 minutes and escape and have a laugh. It’s interesting — all these crime documentaries and horror movies are so big, and this dark time that we’re in, I feel like this movie is needed right now. That’s why it’s sort of a nice escape from the weird times we’re in to have a laugh at the insanity of what’s going on.
Operation Taco Gary’sscreened at the 2024 Austin Film Festival, which ran October 24-31.
Sean Boelman
Managing Editor for Film and TV
Articles Published :441
Sean is the Managing Editor for Film and Television, working to determine editorial strategy for the critics team. He has been on the FandomWire team since 2022.In addition to writing reviews himself, Sean helps match writers on the FandomWire team with assignments that best fit their interests and expertise.
