Jason Sudeikis Gets Leading-Man Status in “We’re the Millers”

“Saturday Night Live” breakout star Jason Sudeikis (“Horrible Bosses,” “The Bounty Hunter”) plays David, a small-time drug dealer who’s suddenly sent on a mission to retrieve a huge amount of pot across the Mexican border, in New Line Cinema’s wacky comedy, “We’re the Millers.”

His solution as to how to accomplish that forces him to live out his worst nightmare: to be stuck in a confined space with a bunch of people he doesn’t really like, even if he’s the one who convinced them to come along in the first place as his fake wife and kids.

Sudeikis responded to the humor of “We’re the Millers,” and also to the story’s heart, stating, “There’s a little bit of that squeezed in there, an underlying theme about family not necessarily having to be the one you’re born into, but one that you choose…even if my character does it solely out of convenience and desperation.”

When we first meet David Clark, he is a friendly neighborhood marijuana dealer, going from place to place selling his wares to his regular customers in the Denver, Colorado area. “He’s a guy who gets calls or texts asking him to come over, versus the guy that just sells on the street,” Sudeikis explains. “He delivers pot to cooks, businessmen, housewives, mothers of babies—a different clientele than most people associate marijuana with…unless you know the kind of people that really smoke marijuana.”

The actor goes on to note that the lifestyle, while not something most would aspire to, suits David. “He’s fine just doing his thing, paying the rent, being his own boss and making his own schedule, keeping to himself and getting by unnoticed.”

That all changes when he uncharacteristically steps in to help a damsel in distress—a young street punk being hassled by a group of guys trying to swipe her smart phone. Under the heading of no good deed goes unpunished, David himself gets robbed. His product and profits gone, it’s only a matter of time before his supplier gives him an ultimatum, making him the kind of offer David can’t refuse.

Now obliged to go south of the border and bring back a “smidge” of pot in exchange for $100,000 and his life, David comes up with the idea of creating a pseudo-family to smooth the way. Sudeikis says, “He realizes that he might fly under the radar a bit better under the guise of a family vacation, but he’ll need to hire a fake family first.”

David’s relationship with the woman he eventually hires to be his pretend wife is a contentious one from the start, before he ever concocts his crazy scheme. Early in the film, he and Rose (Jennifer Aniston), his neighbor and a neighborhood stripper, trade barbs in the lobby of their building, making it clear that the two of them have never exactly been friendly. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber says that was not the case with Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston.

Not liking each other couldn’t be farther from the truth when it comes to the pair who has worked together several times before, but this was the first time they would star opposite each other.

“When we finished working on ‘Horrible Bosses,’” Aniston offers, “we both wanted to find something really great to do together again—and for the full length of the film, not just little snippets. Jason is so much fun and a friend, and the script was so funny, it was easy to say yes to this one.”

New Line Cinema’s “We’re The Millers” opens across the Philippines on Sept. 18 and is distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.