In the romantic comedy When in Rome, Beth (Kristen Bell) is a young, ambitious New Yorker who is completely unlucky in love. Disillusioned with romance, she travels to Rome, where she impulsively steals some coins from a reputed fountain of live. The coins attract an assortment of odd suitors, including a sausage merchant, a street magician and an artist. But, when a persistent reporter throws his hat in the ring, she wonders if his love is the real thing.
During a press conference to promote the film, co-stars Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel talked about how much fun they had making When in Rome together.
Q: Kristen, are you as much of a workaholic as your character? If you met a guy, would he have to be as important to you as your job?
Kristen: I think your significant other should be way more important than your work. Personally, I love working. I don’t know that I’d say I’m a workaholic because I also love relaxing. I don’t think I’m a workaholic, but currently I feel I’m at a really lovely place and I’m grateful to be where I am, so I like working too.
Q: Your character doesn’t believe in magic or superstitions. What about yourself?
Kristen: I’m not very superstitious at all. I never have been. I’ll walk under ladders.
Josh: One of her hobbies is breaking mirrors, in fact.
Kristen: Absolutely! I like to smash mirrors, any chance I get. No, I’m not superstitious at all.
Q: Kristen, how was the experience of carrying this film for you?
Kristen: First of all, being surrounded by these guys was so flattering because they all have a style of comedy that I just really envy and often laugh out loud at them. I was grateful for the opportunity. I’m glad that they had the faith in me to be able to pull it off, and I just tried to do the best I could.
Q: Josh, you had the opportunity in this to exercise the physical comedy muscle that people haven’t often seen you do, with all of the pratfalls. How was it to get the opportunity to do that? Was that fun or did you worry about hurting yourself?
Josh: (Director) Mark Steven Johnson worried about me hurting myself more than I did.
Kristen: We took out a huge policy on his face, before we started this movie.
Josh: If Mark and I had any arguments in this film, it was for that. There was a scene where I was supposed to run into this car, but the stunt coordinator had it set up where the car was going to sweep out my leg, I was going to roll under the front of the hood and roll up onto the windshield, and look in and see that it was my friend, Puck (Bobby Moynihan). It wasn’t the most well-conceived stunt ever performed, and it took us a few times. The first two times we did it, I literally went right over the top of the car. One time, I fell on my shoulder and neck. And then, another time, I fell some other way over the other edge of the car. They almost pulled the plug on the stunt, but I talked Mark into letting me do it one more time because I’d figured it out and when we did it right. We literally took out the windshield on the front of the car. But, this was more in line with the way I am, anyway. I’m more of a klutz than anything, so I just had a lot of fun coming up with as much stuff as we could.
Q: Kristen and Josh, what was it like to do a romantic comedy together? How did you build that relationship enough, so that it pays off in the end for the audience?
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