Kate Mara opens up on working experience in ‘Friendship’

Kate Mara about crawling through tunnels for ‘Friendship’ alongside Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd

Kate Mara might be best known for her dramatic turns in House of Cards and A Teacher, but her latest role in the absurdist comedy Friendship took her somewhere very different—specifically, into a cold, wet tunnel with a bat overhead and Tim Robinson by her side.

Joining the cast of Friendship meant stepping into the wild and wonderfully weird world of Robinson’s humor, though Mara admits she didn’t really know what she was getting into at first.

“It was all on the page,” she told Variety. “It was such a great script, so funny. My reaction was, ‘Wow. Why did he think of me?’”

Turns out, writer-director Andrew DeYoung had a plan: let Mara play it straight.

“Andy really wanted me to come at this performance like a dramatic film. You’re not playing any of the funny things, which is why it becomes so funny,” she explained.

While Mara starts out as the seemingly normal wife of Robinson’s awkward marketing exec Craig, her character Tami soon reveals layers of eccentric charm—kissing her son on the lips, lamenting her tiny car, and getting a little too nostalgic about an ex named Devon.

One especially memorable scene involved Mara and Robinson exploring a tunnel system beneath their fictional town—and a surprise visitor overhead.

“I thought for sure it would be on a stage. But it definitely was not,” Mara said with a laugh.

“It was gross and wet and cold. And then there was a bat above my head, a little baby sleeping bat! Right before a take, I just looked up and thought, ‘That’s a weird place to put a boom.’ I couldn’t compute that it was real. And then when we all realized that it was real, we obviously put that in the scene where there’s a bat!”

On top of bat encounters, Tami’s love life also gets a little complicated. Cue Paul Rudd as Austin Carmichael, a charismatic weatherman who treats Tami like, well, royalty.

“I mean, one of the characters is treating her like a really interesting queen, and the other is treating her like – I don’t know. His little sister?” Mara said.

“They got married when they were young, and had a kid right away. They’re so familiar with each other. A lot of us just sort of become way too comfortable in a space or a relationship or whatever, and so you get lazy. And then this magical sort of unicorn shows up and sees you, and is interested in what you’re passionate about. So then you light up. It’s actually very easy. Paul Rudd is like a unicorn