The Spy Who Dumped Me interview: Director Susanna Fogel on the film's surprising use of violence

'Reading these criticisms, I’m like, 'Oh, I wonder if you’d be saying that if it was a male-driven thing.''

A thumb severing; a head dunked into a boiling pot of fondue; a direct hit to the face with an 18th-century cannonball. The Spy Who Dumped Me, Susanna Fogel’s new comedy starring Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis as two blundering Americans entangled in an international conspiracy, is surprisingly violent.

While some critics have applauded the film’s bravado, others have deemed the level of brutality at odds with a film of this nature. But if violence is inherently against The Spy Who Dumped Me’s very nature, what exactly is that nature?

“I think about this a lot,” Fogel tells me. “Because I’m curious about why it seems surprising to people given that there’s a rich history of action comedies that are a little bit more visceral in that way.”

To add to that, where culturally do we draw the line between an ultra-violent comedy, which puts a sentimental emphasis on the relationships between its characters, like this year’s Deadpool 2, and an ultra-violent comedy, which puts a sentimental emphasis on the relationships between its characters, like The Spy Who Dumped Me?

Certainly, gender disparity could have had a hand here, and it’s hard to dismiss as coincidence the fact that the other major female-led spy spoof of recent years, Paul Feig’s Spy, also had its use of violence met either with surprise or, in some cases, called entirely into question.

It’s hard also to ignore the parallels in how Bridesmaids’ own crassness was weaponised against it, while male-led comedies continued to be given much wider leeway in what constitutes bad taste. Have we been culturally warped to make certain assumptions about what female-led comedy should consist of?

For Fogel, there’s no clear-cut answer, as she replies: “I wanted to it do justice to the genre and I didn’t think about it from the gender perspective. But now, sometimes, reading these criticisms, I’m like, ‘Oh, I wonder if you’d be saying that if it was a male-driven thing.’ And I’m not sure. We’ll never know.”

Director Susanna Fogel with stars Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon (Hopper Stone/SMPSP)

Indeed, as a director, Fogel was far more interested in reviving a classic style of action-comedy that engaged sincerely with the action, citing the likes of Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop.

In The Spy Who Dumped Me, Kunis and McKinnon’s characters, Audrey and Morgan, are repeatedly dropped into the middle of gunfights and car chases that played largely straight in their choreography; the only comedy here is watching how these two characters will manage to awkwardly stumble their way through the situation.

It’s an approach she doesn’t see as well represented in modern comedy, where the emphasis is largely on slapstick – especially true, she argues, when those comedies are female-driven.

“I find that comedic action doesn’t really feel like it has the stakes,” she explains. And, to Fogel, comedy and action make for a rather harmonious pair, since the success of both is reliant entirely on good timing – a factor that, helpfully, also made the transition into her first action feature a relatively straightforward one for the director. “The surprise to me is that it felt instinctive in a way,” she says.

She also saw both the Bourne and Bond films as a major influence, to the point that she hired a stunt coordinator who had worked on both franchises, Gary Powell.

Bond helped shaped the later, glossier sequences of the film, once Audrey and Morgan have crossed paths with dashing MI6 agent Sebastian (Sam Heughan), and have managed to “get into their groove”. Bourne, meanwhile, is reflected in Justin Theroux’s Drew, the eponymous spy who does the dumping: an edgier, more rogue presence that we’re first introduced to while on the run from several eager assassins.

However, perhaps what’s made The Spy Who Dumped Me feel like such an outlier is that, at the centre of all its thrills and kills, stands a truly real, truly relatable friendship. One reminiscent of Fogel’s previous work, such as her heartfelt 2014 film Life Partners, starring Gillian Jacobs and Leighton Meester, in which a friendship finds itself fractured by a serious relationship.

Arguably, the reverse is true here: Aubrey receiving a brutally unceremonious break-up text from Drew is exactly what launches her and Morgan onto their adventure, one that ultimately reminds they’re each other’s biggest cheerleaders in life.

Aubrey and Morgan are refreshingly ordinary additions to the genre. They are the bumbling, witless individuals caught up in epic circumstances: a trope so familiar for men, but almost alien to see in two women at the centre of an action film. What we’re used to seeing, as Fogel points out, is “some type or archetype of a woman – it’s a wife, or a sex assassin.”

Kate McKinnon and Mila Kunis in The Spy Who Dumped Me (Hopper Stone/SMPSP)

When the majority of action films are written and directed by men, the result is “an outside-in approach to [female characters]. It probably doesn’t have that live-in quality of… just a person. I consider myself to be a pretty competent person, but I also do dumb things.”

“Sometimes my friends and I are silly and sometimes we’re serious, and sometimes we’re emotional and sometimes we’re not. We should be allowed to be all of those things, but it can be hard sometimes when we’re being written about by people who don’t necessarily know what to do with us, because they can’t put us into one category or another.”

With The Spy Who Dumped Me, Fogel wanted only to make the kind of film she wanted to see and, if that required smashing a few stereotypes in the process, it was worth the risk. On that level, it’s understandable why audiences walked away so surprised that a female-led comedy would tackle head-on the type of graphic action that’s been dominated by male voice – this is a new frontier.

The hope now is that Fogel’s work is the marker of a new creative freedom for women in Hollywood, and won’t just become another anomaly that proves the rule.

As she explains: “if enough women are a part of the story, then I think it will take the pressure off each one to represent all female filmmakers or to be an example that all women are supposed to follow. It’s a lot of pressure when there’s just a few of us doing it. And there’s just too many of us and too many ideas and too many talented people to have to be dealing with that pressure.”

The Spy Who Dumped Me is out now.