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As far as date movies go, “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me,” a wild London-based rom-com-meets-thriller-meets-horror-meets-thought-provoking-satire, could be either among the worst choices or the best.
“I think it can be
both!” says Jonathan Schey about his feature debut, premiering in Toronto, and a film he says was his attempt to “poke fun at performative nice guys” in the dating world.
“Ideally, if a date went to see this movie, the girl would be loving what’s happening to the guy and the boy would be a bit like: Fuck, I am this guy. And then they’d have to go for a drink and hash it out.”
“Everybody Wants to Fuck Me,” from Studiocanal, Film4, LuckyChap and Parkville Pictures, stars Taron Egerton as singleton Adam. On the outside, Adam ticks all the boxes of the modern, polite, thoughtful, feminist and culturally-rich man. He carries a Mubi tote bag and has a poster of Agnes Varda’s “Cléo from 5 to 7” on his wall. He buys Maya Angelou novels from his local bookshop and reads them in independent coffee shops over a flat white after yoga class. He has a cute little dog (a terrier) he goes jogging with. He is, notes Schey, “someone who is working very, very hard to be viewed by women as a nice guy.”
And yet, Adam is also a predatory dater and fuckboy (a “horny little freak” according to one character), who uses his carefully crafted persona to chat up any attractive woman in his vicinity, only to then ditch them post-hook up by blaming, among many well-rehearsed excuses, his “bojangled headspace.”
But what starts out feeling like a contemporary romantic comedy takes a sharp turn when one encounter (at a theater bar, of course) leads to Adam’s desirability levels skyrocketing uncontrollably, prompting a crescendo of chaos that moves “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” into horror-thriller territories (in one scene, a pack of women chase after him down a street). This is “Obsession,” but on a much broader — and thankfully more hilarious and less gory — level.
“The need to be looked at and gazed turns on him — it’s become the gaze on steroids,” says Schey, who set out with the idea of taking a “When Harry Met Sally”-style movie and smashing it against another genre.
In Egerton, he saw someone who could play a “nebbishy” man like Billy Crystal. “They’re charming, they’re funny and then suddenly I was like… Taron Egerton! He’s amazing and in ‘Rocketman’ and ‘Eddie the Eagle,’ very funny,” he says, adding that since the actor had made so many U.S. movies he hadn’t been seen on screen using his own accent for some time. “So I thought, oh, this is an exciting opportunity. [Adam] is someone who is likeable and unlikeable. He’s the murky area character and I just thought Taron could carry an audience through the film. And even if you didn’t like him, you’d find him charming … which is what Billy Crystal did.”
Alongside Egerton, “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” boasts a buzzy British cast including Jessica Henwick, Charly Clive and Mia McKenna-Bruce (the “How to Have Sex” star’s small role was inspired by Drew Barrymore’s in “Scream”). Meanwhile, “SNL U.K.” season 1 breakout Paddy Young makes a brief appearance (in his feature film debut), as does season 2 addition Freddie Meredith.
Amusingly, the inspiration for “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” began in a way that Adam would thoroughly approve of, via a female stand-up comedian at London’s Soho Theatre.
Several years ago, Schey’s friend Mary Beth Barone (who recently landed her own Netflix special) was doing a show in which she would quiz guys about their online dating life. He “naively” agreed to take part.
“She had my messages and my profile projected behind her and was analyzing it scientifically, and I’d done the whole spiel of going on dates and then sending these essays being like, ‘Sorry, I’m not in a great headspace, blah blah blah,'” he says. “And the reaction in the room was really interesting. Women were yelling and laughing and cheering at her destroying my Hinge profile, and the guys were all like, ‘Oh, shit.'”
But amid the embarrassment as his dating app nice guy routine was gleefully ripped apart, Schey saw an opportunity. “I just remember thinking, there’s something here to tap into. There’s a frustration, there’s an anger, but there’s a relatability to everyone’s exhaustion with dating. So a lot of the movie was poking fun at myself.”
Schey — who previously directed both seasons of cult BBC series “Ladhood” — admits that he once had a poster on his wall for Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” but was told to take it down by a friend.
“I was like, ‘Why?” and she said, “You know why — because it’s showing that you love feminist movies and arthouse movies,” he says. “And 90% of me was like, ‘No, I love that movie,’ and 10% of me was like, ‘Yeah.'”
With “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” now hitting film festivals, global epicenters for Mubi tote bags and men proudly hanging “The Worst Person in the World” posters on their walls, there might be many in the audience who watch Adam and think “Fuck, I am this guy.”
