Young actress Emma Roberts (“Aquamarine,” “Valentine’s Day”) stars in New Line Cinema’s hit comedy “We’re the Millers” as pierced street punk Casey, who rounds out the fake Miller family as the daughter David (Jason Sudeikis) never wanted. He knows she’s practically homeless; she knows she can get some cash out of him. So, they strike a deal for her to come along.
In the film, David Clark (Sudeikis) is a small-time pot dealer who, in order to pay a huge debt to his supplier, Brad (Ed Helms) must now become a big-time drug smuggler by bringing Brad’s latest shipment in from Mexico. Twisting the arms of his neighbors, cynical stripper Rose (Jennifer Aniston) and wannabe customer Kenny (Will Poulter), as well as streetwise teen Casey, David devises a foolproof plan. One fake wife, two pretend kids and a huge, shiny RV later, the “Millers” are headed south of the border for a Fourth of July weekend that is sure to end with a bang.
Emma Roberts allows that her character “is a runaway and a bit of a delinquent, a brat, a rebel, and in it for the money. The four of them, the Millers, could not be any more different; they’re all kind of loveable, but each character has a quirky shortcoming of some kind, which makes for a funny group. And a pretty realistic family, I think,” she laughs.
Roberts enjoyed getting to revisit the attitude she remembers from her own teen years in playing Casey. “She’s so sarcastic and she’s miserable for a lot of the movie,” the actress says. “So it was fun to get to play her just because I got to do a lot of eye-rolling and huffing and puffing. I guess I went through a phase like that, so it was fun to get to play that.”
Roberts says her greatest challenge on the movie was being away from family and friends for the film’s three-month shoot, but says co-star Jennifer Aniston helped. “She was so nice,” Roberts recalls. “We hung out a little bit outside of work and she was just the sweetest, most down-to-earth person. And I’ve always been such a fan of Jennifer, so to get to work with her was really, really cool. And Jason Sudeikis is hilarious. He was really funny. A lot of the stuff in the movie he ad-libbed, and we would be dying laughing, trying to hold it in so we could get through the take.”
On the set, Roberts was frequently on her smart phone, tweeting, checking email, and so forth. She even selected her character’s prop smart phone for use in the film to match her own, real one, so she could use that when in the background.
“Very cagey, that Emma Roberts,” director Rawson Marshall Thurber grins, adding that “Emma is funny in a way that I don’t know if she knows how funny she is. She has no filter, so she’ll say whatever’s on her mind, and some of it is truly the most hilarious stuff you can imagine. She was fabulous.”
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.