Tiffany Haddish on Paul Schrader Taking Her out of Her Comfort Zone in ‘Card Counter’

variety.com:

Stuart Miller Even by lone wolf standards, William Tell stands apart. Or so he tells himself. Out of prison and playing poker for money, Tell breaks his self-imposed isolation when he’s approached by La Linda, a sultry and mysterious backer of gamblers.“I’m always looking for a good thoroughbred,” La Linda says with a sly smile, before dipping her head to sip a drink.

It’s a key moment in Paul Schrader’s “The Card Counter,” a scene between Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish that catalyzes their relationship, one of the film’s two major storylines.But the dialogue was not in the script. “I pitched that line about seventeen times,” Haddish says with a gleeful laugh. “Paul would say no, but I kept dropping it in.” Sure, Schrader had cast the comedian seeking the alchemy you get “when you take a natural performer outside their comfort zone,” but he had then spent rehearsals stripping the comedic rhythms and sensibilities from Haddish’s performance.It was taking away the essence of what earned her renown in “The Carmichael Show,” “Girls Trip” and in her ruthlessly committed comic performance in a supporting role in Eric Andre’s outrageous “Bad Trip,” which she had filmed just before “Card Counter.”Haddish acknowledges that she’s someone who’s “always searching for the punchline “and when the camera comes on I get my comedy backpack on to make heavy situations lighter.

It’s a defense mechanism and I had to turn that off.”From working with Isaac, Haddish, who is usually physically expressive (she raises her eyebrows, wrinkles her forehead and swivels her neck while saying that to make her point), learned that you could “just be still.