Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear Interview

Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear play conjoined twins in Stuck on You, the outrageous new comedy from The Farrelly Brothers. Tiscali caught up with the two stars.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly became one of the most successful writing and directing teams in Hollywood when their debut comedy, Dumb and Dumber, was a box office smash in 1994.

In Stuck on You, the Farrellys tackle a subject very close to their hearts - brothers. And in this case, the brothers couldn't be closer sharing not just an emotional bond, but a physical one too. Walt and Bob Tenor are joined at the hip and do absolutely everything together.

Matt Damon plays Bob Tenor and Greg Kinnear plays Walt. Damon is one of Hollywood's favourite sons. He won an Academy Award for Best Original screenplay, with his close friend Ben Affleck, for the critically acclaimed drama Good Will Hunting. He was also nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for playing the title role.

Greg Kinnear successfully switched from hosting a popular chat show, E Entertainment's Talk Soup, to acting with his debut in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina. He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance alongside Jack Nicholson in the comedy As Good As It Gets and has also starred in such diverse films as Neil LaBute's black comedy Nurse Betty, with Renee Zellweger, the supernatural thriller The Gift, the romantic comedy Someone Like You and more recently, Paul Schrader's Auto Focus and the Vietnam war epic We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson.

You spent some time attached to each other before filming. How was that?
Kinnear: Yeah we did. We spent some time at Carrie Fisher's house playing tennis, cooking burgers.
Damon: Yeah playing tennis was fun.

Why Carrie Fisher's house?
Damon: The Farrellys know Carrie Fisher and she had a tennis court. That's how it works with these guys. 'Go over to Carrie Fisher's tennis court, she'll be waiting for you, don't worry about it...%u2018
Kinnear That's how it is and usually they call you fifteen minutes before they want you to do something.

Did you actually know each other before this film?
Damon: Actually we had signed up for the movie before we even met each other...
Kinnear: It was a dangerous exercise. It could have gone horribly wrong. Oh let's not kid ourselves (laughs) it did go horribly wrong!

How is the fact that you look so different explained in the story?
Damon: You know, they originally wanted Jim Carey and Woody Allen and that would have meant they needed an explanation as to why they looked so different. So they came up with one has more liver and the other was aging a lot worse. That was it really.

So they think about that kind of detail?
Kinnear: Their movies have an element of the outrageous but there is an element of reality to them.

How did you prepare for being joined together like that? Did you train?
Damon: When you say 'train' it suggests something methodical (laughs). But there was no science in this. They tied us together and they just pushed us so it was just time spent walking around together and getting used to it. Once we started shooting we were together 12 hours a day. At first, before we would even sit down, we would go 'one, two three...sit!' But a week into it we could stand, we could walk, we would sense what the other was doing.
Kinnear: And we weren't sure who was moving who. It was like on a Ouija board. Everyone puts their hands on and sure enough this stupid thing starts to move. Somebody's pushing it. There are no spirits, OK. (laughs). Actually, we did some work with a trainer for the tennis, the sports..
Damon: The baseball, the hockey, the cooking, we kind of made up that routine.

How does it work with the practicalities of life when you are tied together like that? What happens with the toilet?
Damon: Well, truthfully the bathroom scenario for guys, I mean we do it all the time, I mean at least half of the bathroom scenario we do anyway.
Kinnear: Yeah and let's take the other half of it out of the scenario right away, that's not in the equation (laughs).

Was there anything in Stuck On You that you thought might be over the top that didn't make it in the final cut?
Damon: No, the farthest we went is in there. I mean, playing goalie in the hockey team is in there, we had a sex scene, you know, all be it tastefully shot. It's all in there.
Kinnear: The script is pretty representative of the movie and obviously it's a tricky subject matter but they have dealt with this kind of material before and they've kind of gone to the line and straddled it a bit and I felt that was what was happening here. And really, if you know these guys a little bit and I've known them for a lot of years, I knew that they would deal with this right and it would be coming from a good place, they have a lot of people with disabilities work on their movies and a lot of actors as well. And they handle this OK.